Our View - Friday

Free press imperiled

Reporting the news leads to jail time

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe,” wrote Thomas Jefferson when our nation was young. But all is less safe today, because on Sept. 21 U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White sentenced San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada to 18 months in prison.

The reporters’ “crime”? According to AP, they refused “to testify about who leaked them secret grand jury testimony from Barry Bonds and other elite athletes” involved in the BALCO steroid scandal, in which the athletes allegedly used illegal steroids to enhance performance. The Chronicle reporters are appealing the ruling.

The reporters refused the grand jury request because, they said, their job is to report the news, and sometimes the identities of those who are part of the news-gathering process need to be protected.

The right to keep the confidence of sources is essential to news gathering and to journalists finding out what’s going on, especially in government. In the celebrated Valerie Plame case, the argument for forcing reporters to give up their sources for the narrow purpose of protecting national security might have been persuasive to some people (but not us). A ruling against the Chronicle reporters should more clearly be seen as a threat to the practice of good journalism.

Judge White released the text of his ruling Monday. “The court does not fault Fainaru-Wada and Williams for their convictions” and doing their jobs as reporters, the judge wrote. And he continued, in his own italics, “Nor is the court acting to punish them for maintaining those convictions.” But he said, almost in remorse, that “this court is doing its job, which is to interpret and apply the law to the facts before it.”

Actually, his job is to uphold the First Amendment, which stipulates, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”

This is a federal case. Had it been a state case, the court could not have made a similar finding because of California’s shield law, which protects the sources and notes of reporters — putting an exclamation point after the First Amendment. There is no such federal shield law.

The Chronicle reporters “ought not to be in jail,” Tom Newton, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, said. “This is the result of overzealous federal prosecutors. Congress ought to pass a federal shield law to allow journalists to do their jobs of reporting the facts on the very interesting stories out there, without fear of going to jail.”

He pointed to a state nonbinding resolution that passed both houses of the California Legislature in August and urges the U.S. Congress to pass a federal shield law. Colorado’s members of Congress should lead the charge on this one.

Meanwhile, the reporters remain free pending an appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. We urge the court to overturn Judge White’s decision. If journalists are jailed for doing their jobs, our democracy no longer is safe.

Fox not sly enough to fix Mexico’s problems

Mexican President Vicente Fox entered office in 2000 amid high hopes for a new era in politics, with more openness in the federal government, less corruption and more economic stability. When he leaves office in November, his legacy could be far less memorable, given the growing political rift between left and right, escalating street wars in border towns and coastal communities, and a near revolt in the state of Oaxaca.

Fox easily won his single, six-year term in an election thought at the time to hold earthshaking import. He had ended the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and oversaw the first peaceful transition to the political opposition in almost 180 years of Mexican independence. Fox sought to use his victory as a public mandate to push for enormous political reforms to match a new economy under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The former Coca-Cola exec can point to some progress, as inflation has remained low during his tenure while poverty rates have dropped below 50 per cent and manufacturing exports have jumped, according to The Economist magazine. The Zapatista insurrection was quelled early in his administration, and the government survived other sporadic uprisings.

But economic growth has been anemic, the main reason behind the steady wave of illegal immigration into the United States, said experts with the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Drug violence and murders have created widespread fear from Ciudad Juarez to Cabo San Lucas. And most observers believe the gap continues to widen between the poorest Mexicans and the richest.

All of this has reached a crescendo in the aftermath of this year’s election to select Fox’s replacement. The winner by a narrow margin, Felipe Calderon, plans to follow Fox’s initiatives toward a freer economy that relies more on private investment than on socialist government control.

But leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador refuses to accept defeat, and he has been able to call on followers to flood the streets of Mexico City for months. These protesters prevented Fox from delivering his final speech to the National Congress, and then last week forced Fox to relocate the traditional re-enactment of the “shout” for independence from Spain. Now, Lopez Obrador is seeking to establish a parallel government that threatens to confuse and severely weaken a Calderon administration.

As Fox counts down his final days in office, he must be looking at the chaos around him and wondering when Mexico will be finally ready to embrace a better future.