Columbia j-school staff: WikiLeaks prosecution ‘will set a dangerous precedent’

A letter from the Columbia Journalism School to the President:


From Poynter



President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Attorney General Eric Holder
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

December 13, 2010

Dear Mr. President and General Holder:


As faculty members and officers of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, we are concerned by recent reports that the Department of Justice is considering criminal charges against Julian Assange or others associated with Wikileaks.

Journalists have a responsibility to exercise careful news judgment when classified documents are involved, including assessing whether a document is legitimately confidential and whether there may be harm from its publication.

But while we hold varying opinions of Wikileaks’ methods and decisions, we all believe that in publishing diplomatic cables Wikileaks is engaging in journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment. Any prosecution of Wikileaks’ staff for receiving, possessing or publishing classified materials will set a dangerous precedent for reporters in any publication or medium, potentially chilling investigative journalism and other First Amendment-protected activity.

As a historical matter, government overreaction to publication of leaked material in the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than the leaks themselves.

The U.S. and the First Amendment continue to set a world standard for freedom of the press, encouraging journalists in many nations to take significant risks on behalf of transparency. Prosecution in the Wikileaks case would greatly damage American standing in free-press debates worldwide and would dishearten those journalists looking to this nation for inspiration.

We urge you to pursue a course of prudent restraint in the Wikileaks matter.
Please note this letter reflects our individual views, not a position of Columbia University or the Journalism School.

Respectfully,

Emily Bell, Professor of Professional Practice; Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Helen Benedict, Professor

Sheila Coronel, Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative;
Director, Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism

June Cross, Associate Professor of Journalism

John Dinges, Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of Journalism

Joshua Friedman, Director, Maria Moors Cabot Prize for Journalism in the Americas

Todd Gitlin, Professor; Chair, Ph.D. Program

Ari Goldman, Professor

LynNell Hancock, Professor; Director, Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship

Marguerite Holloway, Assistant Professor; Director, Science and Environmental Journalism

David Klatell, Professor of Professional Practice; Chair, International Studies

Nicolas Lemann, Dean; Henry R. Luce Professor

Dale Maharidge, Associate Professor

Arlene Morgan, Associate Dean, Prizes and Programs

Victor S. Navasky, George T. Delacorte Professor in Magazine Journalism; Director,
Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism; Chair, Columbia Journalism Review

Michael Schudson, Professor

Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director, Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma



Alisa Solomon, Associate Professor; Director, Arts Concentration, M.A. Program

Paula Span, Adjunct Professor

Duy Linh Tu, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice; Coordinator, Digital Media Program

Assange: "The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade."

From The Guardian.


Julian Assange:
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

Joe Lieberman's Campaign To Trample The First Amendment Is Proceeding Right On Schedule

From Zerohedge.

As if it wasn't enough that America's ruling oligarchs were sufficiently happy with abdicating their governing duties to the Federal Reserve, they have now decided to imitate China in every possible way, and in addition to making up economic data as they go (for actual numbers just look around you, for all the other imaginary bullshit there's the BLS), they have now proceeded to wipe their ass with the first amendment, on their way to converting the US to a complete banana republic. After Joe Lieberman made a mockery of Internet freedom of speech (and of Amazon's independence) he has now decided to step up his campaign against un-coopted journalists everywhere, precisely as we suspected would happen next in the USSA. Per MSNBC, the Independent Connecticut senator has told Tableau, a Seattle company that allows Web users to post charts, to remove several charts describing the release of WikiLeaks material. The company removed the charts on Thursday, following the lead of Amazon, which had taken down the WikiLeaks documents themselves. The punchline: none of the charts contained any classified data: "The charts were not produced by WikiLeaks, but by a freelance journalist. And they contained no classified or secret material. The charts merely depicted how many times each country, or topic, was discussed in the cables." In other words, as Bill Dedman concludes: "these charts were journalism."...

And From Salon's Glenn Greenwald


Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to "all companies" that -- by design -- are causing suppression of political information. I understand Tableau's behavior here; imagine if you were a small company and Joe Lieberman basically announced: I am Homeland Security and you are to cease being involved with this organization which many say is a Terrorist group and Enemy Combatant. What Lieberman is doing is a severe abuse of power, and even for our anemic, power-revering media, it ought to be a major scandal (though it's not because, as Digby says, all our media stars can process is that "Julian Assange is icky").

If people -- especially journalists -- can't be riled when Joe Lieberman is unilaterally causing the suppression of political content from the Internet, when will they be? After all, as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in condemning this, the same rationale Lieberman is using to demand that Amazon and all other companies cease any contact with WikiLeaks would justify similar attacks on The New York Times, since they've published the same exact diplomatic cables on its site as WikiLeaks has on its (added: the only diplomatic cables posted on the WikiLeaks site thus far are the ones published by the newspapers with which WikiLeaks partnered -- such as the NYT, Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc. -- and they include those newspapers' redactions; no other cables have yet been posted to the WikiLeaks site). What Joe Lieberman is doing is indescribably pernicious and if "journalists" cared in the slightest about their own self-interest -- never mind all the noble things they pretend to care about -- they ought to be vociferously objecting to this.

Democracy Game Over - The Nine Are Abroad

The recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow corporations to donate at will to political campaigns in the U.S. by drawing on First Amendment rights intended for individuals is obscene. I'm not surprised however since my view of the state of this country is grim indeed. It seems as if these black robed agents of doom have truly decided that corporations 'deserve' rights at a time when individual rights are being taken away. The evil generation is pushing, pushing pushing...at all sensible foundations.

I know I've read all the opinions about how this represents "freedom" for the corporations. Who the hell wants to give giant corporations the power to advertise at will against their political opponents? Are you all mad? Yes you are. That's my opinion. Should corporations have voting rights as well? Why not just do away with democracy altogether and let the corporations rule over us completely? The only silver lining I have read about is where some claim that this law will change little since corporations already spend as much as they want for their candidates in covert ways anyway.

Corporations are for-profit organizations by nature. They are NOT individuals. The blurring of this obvious distinction seems to be more then just an intellectual mistake, but rather (like the FBI manipulation of Bin Laden's face to look like a political opponent) an in your face act of bravado evil, and a smiling admission of having sunk to new grotesque depths.

Justice Kennedy writes of a democracy for corporations in his majority opinion:

"Favoritism and influence are not … avoidable in representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.”

He is speaking of a democratic responsiveness towards corporations, not individuals. The 'rights' of the corporation are his concern. One commentator describes this in an article in this way:

"according to the Supreme Court, when corporations spend billions manipulating elections and obtain the desired results, this is “democracy.” This Orwellian characterization of democracy could have been dictated by the hedge funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations that routinely inject billions into American politics in return for favors from both corporate-controlled parties."

Even if you believe the skewed and bizarre notion that corporations should have democratic 'rights', (And I can see the idiots making this brilliant point over a latte in the Harvard Law School cafeteria) still there is nothing democratic in letting them spend as much as they want. Individuals are limited as to what they can spend, why shouldn't Coke Cola, JPMorgan or Chevron also have limits?

Eugene Volokh says in a New York Times opinion section that corporate money has always been in politics anyway, in the form of media corporations. Sure, but that is bad enough! The corporations already control the media. Now you want them piling money into non-stop advertising to grease the wheels even more for their bought and paid for politicians?

It must be noted, despite how much the corrupted, weak and misguided fake democrats have caved in to lobby pressure in a thousand and one ways, it is the old seething bile mouthed brontosaurus of right wing fake conservatives on the court who are bringing on this totalitarianism of corporations.

One Ring to Rule Them All.