Censored 2014 (11 page)

In September 2012, the forty-seven-member United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution that for the first time called on nations to “promote a safe and enabling environment for journalists to perform their work independently and without undue interference.” It also called on countries to fight impunity in cases of attacks against journalists, by “ensur[ing] accountability through the conduct of impartial, speedy and effective investigations” into such attacks and “bring[ing] to justice those responsible.”
⁴⁴

The New York Times
and the US corporate press failed to give this important development the prominent coverage it deserved. But if
US establishment media reporting of the important UN resolution on journalists' safety was sparse in 2012, acknowledgment of Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—upon which this and other resolutions and press freedom principles are based— has been nearly nonexistent.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations in 1948, reads:

Article 19 is worth noting here because it affirms freedom of the press as a basic human right, not just the civil right of a nation. Several UN press freedom-related resolutions of the past are based on Article 19, as is the groundbreaking Windhoek Declaration of 1991 by African journalists, which evolved into World Press Freedom Day.

Inspired by the Windhoek Declaration, journalists in other regions of the world—Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean—also have drawn up similarly strong statements of press principles.
⁴⁶
Conspicuously missing from that list of regions is North America, where a kind of Windhoek Declaration is arguably most needed in the world today.

When more news reporters and other media professionals in the United States see themselves and their important public service role as one vital part ofthe larger international picture, and can stand side by side with their colleagues around the world in times of danger, then we may finally begin to see US news reporting that truly informs the public whenever journalism comes under threat of attack anywhere on the globe.

Censored #22: Pennsylvania Law Gags Doctors to Protect Big Oil's “Proprietary Secrets”

Attacking or killing journalists after they report the truth is one way to censor news; another is to use “prior restraints” under the law
before
the truth is reported. Those in the media profession are no strangers
to legal restraints being used to bind and gag them beforehand, based on what they might report. Now, however, that kind of gag is being extended in the US to persons in the medical profession.

Under a controversial new law that went into effect in 2012 in the state of Pennsylvania, doctors must sign a confidentiality agreement before a corporation will release any information to the doctors concerning the chemicals used in deep underground drilling of oil and natural gas, a practice known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”—even when that information directly affects the health of the doctors' patients.

The text of the law, Act 13, stipulates that a fracking company must “identify the specific identity and amount of any chemicals claimed to be a trade secret or confidential proprietary information to any health professional who requests the information in writing,” but only “if the health professional executes a confidentiality agreement and provides a written statement of need for the information” for treating patients.
⁴⁷

Like other states, Pennsylvania is undergoing a virtual gold rush of fracking by oil and gas companies. There are an estimated 5,000 oil and gas drilling wells located around the state, and the number of sites continues to grow.
⁴⁸
The drilling, which is done with toxic chemicals, has led medical professionals, local residents, and activists alike to raise serious environmental concerns about contaminated groundwater and about the resulting outbreaks of health problems among people living near the drilling sites.
⁴⁹

This puts medical professionals in a bind: doctors in Pennsylvania can be sued by patients for not informing them of the health risks of fracking, which may involve naming the actual “secret” chemicals used at local fracking sites. As one Pennsylvania doctor put it: “What is the big secret here that they [fracking companies] are unwilling to tell people, unless they know that if people found out what's really in these chemicals, they would be outraged?”
⁵⁰

There has been some decent reporting of this “doctor gag rule” in the US corporate press, including, for example, by the New York-based website
International Business Times
⁵¹
as well as by the
Los Angeles Times.
⁵²
But by and large, considering the huge implications this case has for the wider issue of creeping corporate control over public health matters, the doctor gag rule has not garnered nearly the amount of sustained, consistent coverage in the corporate media that it deserves.

This is especially true of one related aspect that appears to have gone unreported in the national media: the possible linking of the doctor gag rule on fracking with the gagging of whistleblowers and activists in Pennsylvania's agricultural industry.
⁵³

Pennsylvania is one of several US states that in the past few years has moved to pass agricultural gag laws—so-called “ag-gag laws”—at the behest of the powerful industrial agricultural lobby. These are laws that would make it a crime for anyone to expose conditions at factory farms where animals are killed and processed for human consumption.

Under House Bill 683, introduced into the Pennsylvania state legislature in February 2013, it would be a felony offense for anyone who “records an image of, or sound from, the agricultural operation by leaving a recording device on the agricultural operation,” or anyone who “uploads, downloads, transfers or otherwise sends recorded images of, or sound ffrom, the agricultural operations over the Internet in any medium.”
⁵⁴

Public concerns are now being raised about such factory farms that are located in the same rural areas of Pennsylvania where fracking operations are also being carried out by oil and natural gas drilling companies. HB 683 deals specifically with gags on exposing industrial farming practices. But there are concerns that if this ag-gag bill is passed into law, it could someday be expanded in scope to include the legal gagging of activists and whistleblowers who expose operations at rural oil and gas fracking sites in Pennsylvania as well.

This is an important case worth keeping an eye on for the future, as a sign of where the ongoing war on truth in the United States is taking us.

RELATED VALIDATED INDEPENDENT NEWS STORY

Prominent Establishment Journalists Turn Whistleblowers over News Censorship

What happens when journalists themselves blow the whistle on censorship within their own ranks? Ask two such journalists who worked for some of the biggest names in American news.

Amber Lyon, a reporter for CNN, produced a one-hour documentary in 2011 titled
iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring,
on how social media were playing a part in the then-unfolding Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. It included a thirteen-minute
segment shot in Bahrain featuring dramatic footage and interviews.
⁵⁵

Lyon said she was later pressured by CNN during the editing process to include Bahraini government denials and untruths about the Arab Spring uprising in that country.
⁵⁶

The documentary aired once that summer on the US domestic edition of CNN, but not on the network's overseas arm, CNN International (CNNi), which is widely watched in the Middle East.
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When she raised questions about it, Lyon said, she was warned by the president of CNNi to drop the subject and not talk about it publicly;
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she later received a similar threat from CNN's business department.
⁵⁹

US journalist Glenn Greenwald has suggested that it had something to do with pressure put on CNN by the government of Bahrain, a close United States ally, in conjunction with a high-priced US public relations firm, in an effort to nip Bahrain's Arab Spring in the bud.
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In response, CNN admitted that it has carried advertising by a Bahraini government agency but strongly denied any connection between that and Lyon's report not airing.
⁶¹
Lyon was later laid off from CNN and has been reporting independently since then.

The second journalist, Daniel Simpson, was a British writer based in Serbia who worked as the Balkans correspondent for the
New York Times
for about a year starting in 2002, reporting mostly on political developments.
⁶²

But Simpson would later recall how
Times
editors leaned on him to slant his stories more in line with the
Times'
conventional wisdom of geopolitics in the Balkan region and in keeping with Bush administration positions in its newly declared war on terror.

This included at one point, he said, being urged by the US embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, as well as by a
Times
colleague in New York, reporter Judith Miller, to dig up evidence that would link the Bosnian Serb Republic to suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
⁶³
Simpson said that Miller (who would later be discredited for her reporting on Iraq) “wanted me to say [in an article] that Serbs were selling Saddam Hussein ‘weapons of mass destruction' delivery systems. Now, it turned out that what they were actually selling was spare parts for planes . . .”
⁶⁴

Fed up, he says, with what he called the “propaganda” and spin being put out by the US government in the war on terror and the supportive role played by the
Times
and other corporate media, he left the
Times
and the news business entirely.

Simpson today is quite open about once having fabricated part of a story that was published on the front page of the
Times,
and about having used a fake identity in a letter to the editor that he sent to the
Times,
later published by the paper while he was still working there.
⁶⁵
These actions strain Simpson's journalistic credibility and cannot be defended.

But at the very least, the claim of self-censorship and institutional bias at the
New York Times,
and the credible evidence of news censorship at CNN, both deserve to be covered and debated widely in the US establishment press, not dismissed or ignored as they have been.

BRIAN COVERT
is an independent journalist and author based in Kawanishi, western Japan. He has worked for United Press International news service in Japan, as staff reporter for three of Japan's English-language daily newspapers, and as contributor to Japanese and overseas newspapers and magazines. He contributed a chapter to
Censored 2013
on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and news censorship in Japan. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Communications at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

Notes

^1.
United Nations, “Declaration of Windhoek,”
http://www.un.org/en/events/pressfreedomday/windhoek.shtml
.

^2.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Safe to Speak: Securing Freedom of Expression in All Media—World Press Freedom Day,” May 2–4, 2013,
http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/WPFD/wpfd2013_agenda_en.pdf
.

^3.
Keith Koffler, “Obama Schedule: Friday, May 3, 2013,” White House Dossier.com,
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/05/02/obama-schedule-friday-3-2013/
.

^4.
White House, “Statement by the President on World Press Freedom Day,” May 3, 2012,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/03/statement-president-world-press-freedom-day
. See also similar statements for the years 2009 to 2011 on the White House website,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
(search term: World Press Freedom Day).

^5.
White House, “Statement by the President in Honor of World Press Freedom Day,” May 1, 2009,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-by-the-President-in-honor-of-World-Press-Freedom-Day/
.

^6.
Finding from search of archives on the White House website,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
(search term: World Press Freedom Day). Accessed on May 28, 2013.

^7.
Barack Obama, “President Obama Holds a Press Conference with President Chinchilla,” video and transcript, White House, May 3, 2013,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/vid-eo/2013/05/03/president-obama-holds-press-conference-president-chinchilla
. See also UNES-CO, “Who Will Expose the Hidden Truths?,” World Press Freedom Day, May 4, 2013,
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/resources/who-will-reveal-the-hidden-truths/
.

^8.
Mark Sherman, “Gov't Obtains Wide AP Phone Records in Probe,” Associated Press, May 13, 2013,
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/govt-obtains-wide-ap-phone-records-probe
.

^9.
“Bradley Manning: Charge Sheet,”
Guardian,
March 4, 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/interactive/2011/mar/04/bradley-manning-charge-sheet
.

^10.
“Primary Documents—US Espionage Act, 15 June 1917,” FirstWorldWar.com,
http://www.first-worldwar.com/source/espionageact.htm
.