Letters to the Editor

• Secrecy and the "Favor" of the Pending Reporter Shield Law

  [Read the article: Tucker Carlson unintentionally reveals the role of the American press]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I think this might be a good time to point out that Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter think that just such atrocious, secrets-protecting American journalistic behavior needs to be rewarded with a federal "reporter shield law" that would grant the corporate employers of these power-serving reporters permission to ignore federal grand jury subpoenas [which are (very rarely) issued only after a painstaking approval process that is mandated by DOJ guidelines whenever reporters are to be questioned]. An exclusion from compelled testimony, to which the rest of us are subject, that would make the "reporters" for Murdoch's Newscorp and GE's NBC, et al, a special, immune class of citizen whenever federal crimes are under investigation, about which they have some pertinent knowledge. In particular, of course, in investigations of crimes committed by those covered by the national media - the legions of powerful, connected insiders in our federal government who like to abuse their positions by selectively leaking their knowledge gained as a public servant, in pursuit of bad faith political and partisan ends, to 'friendlies' in the media with anonymous impunity.

  This is, I believe, a case where the First Amendment is successfully wielded as an unimpeachable, 'politically-correct' justification for such a federal shield law, without regard for the underlying modern realities of the corporate ownership of our "free press" and thus the dangerous power such a shield law would grant to extremely irresponsible, self-serving, private-agenda-promoting corporate ownership that is so often secretly allied with those holding public office [with its access to mountains of (improperly) classified information that's not available to the public at large; information which can - with the help of irresponsible reporters like Judy Miller and Robert Novak - be selectively leaked in misleading ways without easy rebuttal, a uniquely federal-level scenario not available to state government leakers].

  Adding insult to injury, Leahy and Specter (with their shield law already passed out of the Judiciary Committee), issued a joint letter (as posted on Specter's website) to Senators Reid and McConnell, on March 6 this year - the one-year anniversary of Scooter Libby's conviction - to push for floor action on their proposed shield law, a measure which has been publicly opposed by Patrick Fitzgerald, among others. Timed, in effect (if perhaps advertently), to use the poster-child case for why reporters should not be given such special treatment, and unquestioning benefit of the doubt, to promote a measure, which, if passed, I think we will come to regret almost as much as the extremely destructive consolidation of the media that Bill Clinton and Company helped unleash - the real-world effects of which Glenn's post illustrates so well.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/03/AR2007100302000.html

  Permalink Saturday, March 8, 2008 01:41 PM

• The Importance of Civil Jury Trials

  [Read the article: Various items]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  It would seem a great opportunity today and this week to tie together the effort to support the restoration of the rule of law in Pakistan with the bogus attack on trial lawyers by Republicans, the latest such standard party drivel coming from Mr. Oberweis.

  .

  This boilerplate about the dangers and subversive nature of trial lawyers and their ties to the Democratic Party is designed to persuade ordinary Americans to think that going to court is not something they should do. - Dirigo

  Very true, Dirigo.

  Here's a timely condemnation of the Corporate GOP's specious, agenda-obscuring attacks on (private, as opposed to government) "trial lawyers," written recently for the National Law Journal by John Vail:

  The debate about tort reform is largely cast in terms of corporations versus trial lawyers, so it fails to capture what is really at issue: Are citizens in a democracy entitled to make decisions, or must they defer to elites at every turn?

  .

  It is unusual today to talk about the right to sit on a jury as one of the fundamental rights Americans possess, at least as important as the right to vote, but the framers were wholly comfortable with the assertion, and Lincoln described the jury right as the more important one.

  And history makes clear that the right was equally valued in civil cases, in which the people stand between the aggrieved and the asserted doer of wrong, as in criminal cases, in which the people stand between the state and the accused. - John Vail

  http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles/2008/civil_jury_trials.php

  Permalink Sunday, March 9, 2008 03:57 PM