American freedoms are under attack. It’s no secret, but if the government had its way, it would be.

Luckily for us, there are hard working journalists digging for the truth and government officials coming forward to make the truth known.

A flurry of scandals in the past year and an unprecedented number of leak investigations exposed how the Obama Administration spied on and punished journalists and whistleblowers for revealing these truths.

These scandals include the Department of Justice secretly obtaining the phone records of several Associated Press reporters and editors, as well as seizing the emails of a Fox News reporter and investigating him as a criminal.

As for leaked investigations, according to The New York Times, the Obama administration has had eight – compared to three in all previous administrations combined.

The administration looks to appease critics with the Free Flow of Information Act, which will supposedly shield these truth-seeking journalists from its wrath, just recently passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Also known as the Media Shield Bill, this legislation is supposed to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources and testify against them.

In reality, the bill does little more than what the Obama administration intended it to: pacify critics.

The government can still pursue its aggressive measures against journalists if it says that such measures will help national security or prevent against an act of terrorism.

You can bet that this card will be used frequently; the government jumps at every opportunity it gets to use national security or terrorism as excuses to take overly aggressive and unconstitutional action.

Another problem, perhaps the biggest, lies in how the bill defines who will be afforded its protection.

The bill leaves out any “person or entity whose principal function … is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization.”

This is an intentional shot at WikiLeaks, the organization that brought us the revelations of Bradley Manning and made Americans aware of the many illegal and immoral things our government has been up to.

With the amount of shady things going on today, you can bet that Manning and Edward Snowden won’t be the last whistleblowers to come forward, and the government certainly can’t afford to be protecting those who intend to tell the American people the truth.

That being said, only the mainstream media stands to gain anything from the Shield Bill.
But can we really trust mainstream media outlets to hold the Obama administration accountable?

Politico published a story this month, titled “The media’s revolving White House door,” describing how a growing number of high-ranking Obama administration officials are leaving for major positions with mainstream media outlets, and vice-versa.

For example, Doug Frantz, a veteran journalist of The Washington Post and The New York Times, was named Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Public Affairs this month. The Boston Globe’s online politics editor became a senior advisor in the State Department earlier this year. Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, was previously Time magazine’s Washington Bureau chief.

The list goes on and on.

George Orwell, author of the increasingly prophetic novel “1984,” said that “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

The last thing we need today is something that will further protect public relations for a highly secretive and intrusive government. We need to protect those who print what the government doesn’t want, and what we desperately need – that’s journalism.

Nick Smith is a senior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at nxsmith@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Nick_X_Smith.

Published on September 30, 2013 at 1:27 am