American Press Freedom Cannot Stand the Test of Facts
According to CNN’s report on January 13, 2021, a VOA reporter was demoted for asking questions to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after he delivered a speech praising American freedoms and condemning repressive regimes such as China and Iran.
There is something wrong with a journalist being demoted just for raising questions. In fact, such suppression of journalists is not uncommon in the United States. We can realize this deeply especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. On June 24, 2020, a reporter of VOA called Susteron tweeted that the White House, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and other agencies put her on the “blacklist” for interview without alleging that she had factual errors in the epidemic report.
The United States has long been known for its support of democracy, human rights and freedoms. In such a free environment, people and the media seem to have full freedom to receive and publish the news. Common sense tells us that if the journalists do not make a mistake in principle, both the US government and media should protect the journalists’ right to report news in an objective and fair way. However, what they do does not correspond to what they have been preaching.
Recently, some journalists have been attacked by local police while reporting on the spot, whether they are the domestic or foreign journalists. A CNN journalist Omar Jimenez and his production team were arrested by police on May 29th, as he was broadcasting live from a protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Even when he identified himself as a journalist, it didn't help. And on the same day and same place, a female journalist Linda Tirado was suspected of being hit by a police rubber bullet, causing her left eye to be permanently blind. Besides, on June 2nd, a peaceful protect in front of the White House was violently broken up by police. At the scene, journalists from Russia, Turkey and other countries were attacked by police. Nicole Russo of the Russian Sputnik news agency said she was repeatedly shot by police who used flash grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas at the protest site, even though she showed her press card on the spot. This caused her to cough and she got multiple injuries to her legs and buttocks.
This is the status quo of American journalists. When their news reports and interviews are beneficial to political parties or the government, they are called “the public institution of the whole society” by them. But if not, their voices can be hard to spread. This is one of the reasons why a significant portion of American people do not trust the American media. According to a survey released by the Knight Foundation and Gallup Inc., more than 4 out of 5 Americans (86%) say that news organizations advocate political viewpoints rather than report the news free of bias.
These are American journalists under control from the government and political parties, which greatly damage the freedom of the press in the US and also result in the Americans’ distrust to the media. Freedom of the American press is a dancer in ideological shackles. It is also a tool manipulated by American politicians to achieve their political and economic interests. American politicians have a variety of methods to influence news coverage. In addition to the control of journalists, the freedom of the press in the United States is also compromised in other ways.
Freedom of the press in the US has ramifications when the media reports news. They always stand on the side of the bourgeoisie so that they have different attitudes. During the epidemic, the New York Times posted a series of tweets on social media, commenting on the huge loss of people's lives and freedom caused by China's “city ban”, while Italy's “ban” was taking an economic risk to rein in the coronavirus. The two messages were published just 20 minutes apart. Obviously, the US media has been viciously attacking China lately. This is also a reflection that the American press freedom is essentially controlled by the bourgeoisie. In the last century Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”, and the American media chose the Soviet Union as an important target for “attack”. With the rise of China as a socialist power, American media have turned their attention to China.
Dr. Kang Jian noted in his paper that the US media has formed a framework for reporting on China. The Wall Street Journal's news reporting framework is a typical example. With China becoming the world's second largest economy, the Wall Street Journal's China Media Framework has focused more on China's challenges to the international order. Take cyber security reports of the Wall Street Journal as an example, China has been constructed to be a stealer of US commercial information so that poses a major threat to US cyber security. Especially in Mandiant's 2013 report APT1: Exposure to Chinese Cyber Espionage Units, which said that the US government had put pressure on China through various channels since it said that Chinese soldiers had stolen US trade secrets. The Wall Street Journal described China as an ambitious challenger. Under the amplification of the media, the construction of this image will deepen the negative impression of the American public on China. As a result, it is not conducive to China-US cooperation and development.
In a word, plenty of facts have shown that the freedom of the American press is based on capitalist private ownership. The American media are largely influenced by politics and politicians. This is the freedom of the press for capitalists, not for the masses. Therefore, their purpose of the news report is to safeguard the interests of the bourgeoisie, which means that they cannot truly represent the people and report objectively.
This commentary reflects the author’s personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Global Engagement Academy Shandong University (Weihai).
Dong Yushu, undergraduate student of School of Journalism and Communication, Shandong University.
董雨姝，山东大学新闻传播学院本科生
