Decline and Fall

A fascinating interview with Josh Rushing, the former Marine Public Affairs Officer who was told to stop speaking to the press because he had committed the unpardonable sin of defending Al Jazeera. He now works for Al Jazeera International, where he has seen, over and over again, the mind-numbing absurdity of America's new distrust of the press. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, but this section in particular was astonishing for its sheer absurdity:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that first story you went out on. Talk about going to North Dakota and what happened.

JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, you know, it seemed like a simple story. We were going to do a story about Small Town America, and there's actually a part -- and, you know, the country is obsessed with immigration, how many people are coming over the border. Well, there's part of North Dakota, this kind of western, northwestern North Dakota, where the towns are actually emptying out. All the kids are graduating, going away and not coming back, to the point there's actually small towns that will give you money to put your children in the school system there and land. They'll give you free land to build your house on, just trying to attract somebody to keep these communities alive. So I wanted to see what's the value in these communities. So it's a real nice, charming story, extolling the values of Small Town America.

Well, I go up, and it was kind of interesting, because a reporter came out on my first day there, a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she was surprised at how I was dressed. And I thought, well, maybe I'm kind of casual to be on TV. I was in blue jeans. And she said, "No, I thought you'd be in robes and a head scarf." You've got to be kidding. Why would I be in robes and a head scarf? "Well, you're Al Jazeera, you know. And that's what we were looking for." So it was --

AMY GOODMAN: So she came out to do a story on you --

JOSH RUSHING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- doing a story in her town.

JOSH RUSHING: Absolutely, right. And so, you know, I gave her a nice interview. She kind of got it. And a couple days later she called me, really terrified and upset. And she said a federal agent had been to her office, had asked her to step outside. She said, "Can I bring my reporter's notebook?" And he said, "No. I'll be the one asking questions," took her out and started asking her questions like, you know, "Who did you talk to? Did he seem like a citizen? Did he seem like an American? Did he have a camera? He didn't take pictures, did he?" "Of course, he took pictures. They're doing a story, you know? A news story."

And he said there were possible international implications to me being that close to the unsecured border. Let alone, I came from Washington, D.C., where my office is three blocks from the White House. Now I'm a danger in northwestern North Dakota. So it turns out he was from the Border Protection, Customs & Border Protection. He went around and did that to everyone I interviewed so that I couldn't go back and get another interview. We were going to go back and do the high school graduation, and we were unwelcome at that point, because people were worried. They were worried -- are there international implications they don't know about? Had they said something that would put the country at risk to me, or even worse, maybe put themselves at risk from their own country? At the time, it was the NSA wiretapping story that was in the news. And even this reporter worried about calling her mom, because was she now on the wiretap database, and would that put her mom on the list, as well? So I was going through this kind of weird time, where I'm being followed by federal agents. I'm just trying to do a story about the value of Small Town America.

It's hard to make up satire like this. The point Rushing has been making ever since he saw the way Arab news media were shunned by military commanders in Iraq is that if we aren't getting our message out to the Arab world, the mission of "building democratic institutions" over there, er, here, is utterly lost. Al Jazeera, contrary to what the right has asserted and the American "liberal media" has dutifully repeated, is actually one of the best signs that open societies might actually be on their way in that/this part of the world. Any news organization willing to rake enough muck to get themselves kicked out of a monarchy for offending the regime is good with me. As noted in this Washington Post op-ed,

Most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.

Al-Jazeera has even been labeled "Zionist" by the Arab street and its regimes. It is the only Arabic broadcaster to put Israeli officials on television and to report the Israeli side of stories. Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres have been invited to appear on the network, although they ultimately did not. But Israel routinely sends Arabic-speaking officials to participate on various programs.

What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.

My, how times have changed. But it's not surprising, really, when you consider that the U.S. is steadily declining on the worldwide press freedom scale. I can only hope that one of these days someone in our country's leadership will, perhaps out of benign curiosity, pick up the constitution and notice that it's actually pretty explicit about how important the press is in a free society.

Labels: GWOT, liberty, politics