by Damon Huss
Recent revelations that the Justice Department seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press (AP) reporters last year have created a controversy concerning the proper balance between freedom of the press and the U.S. government’s national-security concerns.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week to attempt to justify the Justice Department’s action by saying it was part of an investigation into “a very serious leak, a very grave leak” regarding details of a CIA operation. Holder also pointed out that he had recused himself from this particular investigation of reporters.
Last week, the New York Times editorial board published Spying on the Associated Press, a strongly worded criticism of the government’s actions. The editors wrote:
Both Mr. Holder and [Deputy Attorney General] Mr. [James] Cole declared their commitment — and that of President Obama — to press freedoms. Mr. Cole said the administration does not “take lightly” such secretive trolling through media records.
We are not convinced. For more than 30 years, the news media and the government have used a well-honed system to balance the government’s need to pursue criminals or national security breaches with the media’s constitutional right to inform the public. This action against The A.P., as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press outlined in a letter to Mr. Holder, “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press.
…
Mr. Holder said the leak under scrutiny, believed to be about the foiling of a terrorist plot in Yemen a year ago, “put the American people at risk,” although he did not say how, and the records sweep went far beyond any one news article. Gary Pruitt, the president of The A.P., said two months’ worth of records could provide a “road map” to its whole news-gathering operation. [more]
A related issue is military censorship. What is the appropriate policy? See CRF’s free online lesson Press Freedom vs. Military Censorship, which includes a short, balanced reading; discussion and writing questions; and an activity using the GRADE method of policy analysis.
by Damon Huss
Earlier this month, Efrain Rios Montt, former dictator of Guatemala, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala. Yesterday, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court overturned his conviction, for now, because Rios Montt was left without a defense lawyer on April 19.
The 3-2 ruling of the Constitutional Court remands the trial to the date of April 19, which means that all testimony and evidence presented prior to that date still stands. Only the closing arguments of the trial must be done again.
Mike Allison at the Christian Science Monitor‘s Latin America Monitor news blog provides brief analysis of the implications of the ruling:
Now the ruling could be a sign of corruption and impunity. That would obviously be bad…. The court’s reversal comes following weeks of escalating attacks in the press from a powerful economic group, veterans’ groups, and other right-wing groups.
Or it could be a sign that the Constitutional Court is doing its job and making sure that all parties adhere to established legal practices. That would be good as it doesn’t help if justice cuts corners. [more]
Rios Montt has been the first head of state ever tried for genocide in a country’s domestic court. We have previously posted about his trial here and here.
by Shruti Modi
The Week presents its slide show of recent editorial cartoons.
For how to use editorial cartoons in the classroom, see Teaching With Editorial Cartoons.
by Shruti Modi
In Soft (Drink) Power for Foreign Policy, Ian Bremmer interviewed the CEO of Coca-Cola Co.
The financial crisis altered the very nature of the international balance of power. Five years later, the presumption is that the crisis is in the rearview mirror — and that the volatility that shook markets and felled governments is behind us too. But we’ve entered a new order that’s vastly more uncertain than what preceded it. International coordination is breaking down. Global challenges like climate change and nuclear proliferation are becoming more intractable as no one country or group of countries is in a position to set the international agenda. The G-20 is too crowded and conflicted; the U.S.-led G-7 can no longer run the show. In such an environment, we have to ask: What are the big question marks for sustainable global prosperity going forward? How are the roles of the United States and China evolving? And where are the world’s next big opportunities? [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Location, Location, Location, The Economist provides an interactive guide to the world’s housing markets.
THE house-price boom that preceded the financial crisis was remarkable for its scope and scale. With few exceptions, there seemed only one way for prices to go: up. Things have been more diverse since then. In The Economist‘s latest round-up of residential house prices, property markets are both reflecting and reinforcing the “three-speed” global economy. Prices are rising at a robust rate in developing countries like South Africa, where they are up by 11.1% over the past year. America’s battered housing market is recovering with price gains of 9.3% in the past 12 months. But house prices are falling across much of Europe. The housing bust is no longer largely confined to the distressed economies of southern Europe but has spread to core northern members of the euro area like the Netherlands, where prices have fallen by 7% over the past year. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Bert Offerings for Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Podolsky profiles the photographer Bert Stern.
Synonymous with the 60s golden age of advertising, Bert Stern was the cultural provocateur who defined the creative revolution with his seminal Smirnoff-vodka ads (most famously, a martini glass set in front of a looming Egyptian pyramid). He was the first photographer superstar, and his Manhattan studio became a crossroads of 60s pop culture. His unshakable legacy: an obsessive love of the female form as seen in his conceptual imagery of Sue Lyon for his good pal Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, as well as Twiggy, Elizabeth Taylor, and—the apotheosis of the genre—Marilyn Monroe (“The Last Sitting,” comprising more than 2,500 photos, was shot for Vogue six weeks before her death, in 1962). [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Why Private Schools are Dying Out for The Atlantic, Chester E. Finn Jr. discusses the decline in private sector schools.
Private education as we have known it is on its way out, at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. At the very least, it’s headed for dramatic shrinkage, save for a handful of places and circumstances, to be replaced by a very different set of institutional, governance, financing, and education-delivery mechanisms.
Consider today’s realities. Private K-12 enrollments are shrinking – by almost 13 percent from 2000 to 2010. Catholic schools are closing right and left. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, announced in January that 44 of its 156 elementary will cease operations next month. (A few later won reprieves.) In addition, many independent schools (day schools and especially boarding schools) are having trouble filling their seats — at least, filling them with their customary clientele of tuition-paying American students. Traditional nonprofit private colleges are also challenged to fill their classroom seats and dorms, to which they’re responding by heavily discounting their tuitions and fees for more and more students. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In On Criticizing China for The Atlantic, James Fallows evaluates China.
The day just ended, Friday, May 10, was an absolutely beautiful day in Beijing. Warm, clear, sunny, fresh — the kind of moment I celebrated when living here as representing “Paradise Beijing.” What you see above is a random shot I took through a bus window this afternoon on the west side of town.
That’s probably a useful context for a long note from a reader now based in the Boston area, who is taking me to task for the tone of recent commentary about China. I disagree with a lot of his incidental points but actually agree with where he ends up. I’ll explain after giving him his say — and after adding some interior reference numbers for later discussion. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Mapping the Most Hate-Filled Places in America for Co. Exist, Ben Schiller discusses the Geography of Hate, maps that show where people in the country are likely tweeting something hateful.
If you’ve wondered where the truly hate-filled people in America live, take a look at these maps. They’re based on an analysis of 150,000 geo-located tweets from June last year to this April, and show where people are using Twitter to voice off homophobic and racist slurs.
It’s called the Geography of Hate. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Old News for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ben Adler and his father, Jerry Adler, discuss the differences between their two careers in journalism.
Ben: Tell me about your media diet when you were young.
Jerry: As a kid, I read the newspapers that my father brought home: The New York Times and his evening papers of choice, the World-Telegram and the New York Post. There were seven papers in New York back then, segmented somewhat by class, politics, and religion. The Times was the more liberal morning broadsheet, compared to theHerald-Tribune, which was the moderate Republican paper. The Daily News and theMirror were the morning tabloids, pretty much the voices of right-wing Irish Catholicism. The Post—ironically, in light of what it has become—was the liberal, Jewish working-class afternoon paper. I loved those papers. The columnist Murray Kempton was my hero, as a writer. A Sunday New York Times in those years was immense. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Streams of Consciousness for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ben Adler discusses the impact of quick social media news updates for journalism.
My first encounters with journalism were the same as most American males: through the sports pages. Sometime in middle school I started picking up The New York Times on my parents’ dining table during breakfast and reading the Sports section to catch up on the Yankees and Knicks. West Coast games were frequently too late for the home-delivery edition, and the standings were a day out of date, which would probably strike today’s middle-schooler as comically archaic or incomprehensible. Despite that shortcoming, a deeply ingrained habit was formed: The day starts by perusing The New York Times. And now I read the Times for the same reason that I eat Hebrew National hot dogs, tie my necktie in a schoolboy knot, and aspire to buy a brownstone: because it’s what my parents did.
But I’m 31, a dinosaur browsing the Internet on my computer. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In The Dark Arts for The New Yorker, Ben Marcus writes a fictional piece about medical tourism.
He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. It seemed more and more likely that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend wouldn’t be joining him in Germany—even though they’d spent months planning the trip, Julian Googling deep into his unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work whenever she could. A food-truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for the last, broken leg of the journey.
It was meant to be a romantic medical-tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment at the clinic up on the hill. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Xi’s War Drums for Foreign Policy, John Garnaut discusses the implications of the consolidation of power by China’s new leader.
Every morning at 6 a.m., more than two dozen of the world’s leading submarine watchers, aviation experts, government specialists, imagery analysts, cryptanalysts, and linguists gather at the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. Their job is to probe the overnight intelligence reports to guide the activities and strategies of the five aircraft carrier groups, 180 ships, and nearly 2,000 aircraft that constantly patrol the Pacific and Indian oceans. The morning meetings are convened by the fleet’s top intelligence officer, Capt. James Fanell, and cover activities emanating anywhere “from Hollywood to Bollywood,” as the head of U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Locklear, likes to put it. But the group never takes long before zeroing in on the country driving the United States’ military and diplomatic “pivot” to Asia. “Every day it’s about China; it’s about a China who’s at the center of virtually every activity and dispute in the maritime domain in the East Asian region,” said Fanell, reading from prepared remarks at a U.S. Naval Institute conference in San Diego on Jan. 31. [more]
by Shruti Modi
In Want To Boost The Economy (And Make The World Better)? Let In More Immigrants for Co.Exist, Oscar Abello describes a way to boost the economy.
We love to exalt changemakers. The social entrepreneur, the impact investor, the innovator–but the bravest changemaker of all turns out to be the most controversial: the immigrant.
Here in the United States, the current cap for family- or employer-sponsored visas per country of origin is just 25,620–the same number for Belgium or New Zealand as it is for China or India. There are hundreds of millions who want to move but can’t because their countries’ quotas get filled up year after year. That’s a shame, because there’s so much potential for change just waiting to be unleashed behind those quota walls. [more]
