2002 Fellow
Daniel Pearl
The Wall Street Journal

Press release announcing fellow  |  Honorary Degree Citation
Address by Tamara Pearl  |  Remarks from Gary Putka  |  Panel Presentation

David Broder
Thank you, all three. You have given us a rich menu from which to choose. I think for my part I'd like to choose to pick up on the theme that's been part of what all three of you have discussed, which is what Noreen described as the necessity for trust and what Ann and Tony described as the tension between government, to put it mildly, and the press. Let me preface the question that I want to ask each of you by a brief report.

I don't deal with national security matters in my beat. I deal with something where there is, if anything, an excess of information, namely political campaigns and Congress and institutions like that. But I did a little bit of reporting among my colleagues who work in the national security area and I want to add one little piece to the context that's already been created here. It is no secret, I think, to anyone that one of the hallmarks of the Bush administration has been its intense desire, to put it mildly, to control the flow of information and the message that the American people receive from their government. It's a highly organized and a highly centralized effort to channel information in ways that serve the policy purposes and, incidentally, the political purposes of the administration. This particular government is not unique in any respect in that regard, but they are perhaps more efficient about enforcing it than some of the other administrations, notably the Clinton administration, which preceded it, which leaked all over the place.

The interesting thing is that particularly now in the run up to what may be a war with Iraq that that discipline has begun to break down. Two areas particularly I think have been notable. The State Department correspondents, most of whom have a high admiration for the current secretary of state, Colin Powell, have quite willingly carried Secretary Powell's water, if you will, in the internal bureaucratic fighting over the way in which the United States was going to deal with Iraq itself and with the international community. There have been some remarkably clear stories, clear in the sense of where did this come from, about where Secretary Powell thought that Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney were trying to take the President and acknowledging at some points that they seemed to have the upper hand for now, but by golly folks we're still in the fight because we think weıre right about this, and sure enough, in some of those bureaucratic battles the State Department view ultimately prevailed. So, we learned a lot, despite the generally taught discipline that the administration puts out about that particular policy battle.

The interesting comment that I got from my colleagues who cover the Pentagon regularly is that the uniformed military chafing under the restrictions and in many cases objecting to the policy decisions that Secretary Rumsfeld and what they describe as a relatively small, closed group of high advisors are making about the preparations for Iraq, have begun leaking to Pentagon reporters that they trust in ways that one of my colleagues said is the absolute classic leak for the purpose of getting out to the public the dissenting view, by letting the public know what the policy line is that the folks in the uniformed military find worrisome in terms of its practical consequences and unprofessional in terms of the way in which the decisions have been made. It is apparently not uncommon for reporters on that beat to receive phone calls from high ranking officers, three and four star officers, saying, come on by the house, I need to talk with you and I'll have a six pack of beer so we can really talk freely about it.

One of my colleagues said to me the most remarkable thing given the history of the diverging cultures between the military culture and the press culture, which is I think itself a worrisome topic, that so few in the military have had any real experience in our world of journalism, and as the younger cohort comes into journalism so few in journalism have ever had any personal experience in the military. But what the remarkable comment that this colleague made was that in this circumstance some of the senior military people have decided that they trust the press more than they trust their civilian bosses in the Pentagon. Now that may be a unique sort of context but I want to come back to the comment that you made, Ann, about the example that you think, the unhealthy example, that restrictions on the American press set for the world. I wonder if you would talk a little bit more about that point and what it is that you see happening in these terms of restrictions that causes you concern.

Ann Cooper:
Well, shortly after September 11, 2001, we saw several incidents, which fortunately haven't continued at a pace, but there were several very high profile things. For example, the State Department tried to censor an interview that Voice of America had done with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. They did not want his voice on the air. This is a classic government response. A couple of weeks ago you heard Vladimir Putin saying the same thing in Russia, that the voices of the Chechen rebels should not be on the air. I'm not really sure what the thinking is when a government does this. If you keep the voice off the air, if you keep images out of newspapers, does the enemy disappear? Of course not, but it's a classic technique that's used. In the end Voice of America ran the interview, or at least parts of it, so freedom of the press prevailed in the United States.

There was a highly publicized conversation that Condoleezza Rice had with the heads of network television in which she was saying that perhaps they should not be running videotapes of Osama bin Laden. He might be sending verbal messages, hidden messages to al Qaeda operatives, and the network executives were perceived as not exactly following orders but sort of subjecting themselves too much to the governmentıs instructions in this particular case. Colin Powell also had a conversation with the emir of Qatar, where Al Jazeera satellite TV station is based, and essentially said to the emir, "canıt you rein in that TV station?" Again, a kind of classic example of the way governments think in terms of the press and trying to invoke national security. The answer to Colin Powell's problem with Al Jazeera was not to curb the voice of Al Jazeera but to make other voices available, which is actually how the Bush administration did eventually respond in that case. Al Jazeera had complained that they were never able to get access to Bush administration officials to discuss their line, their policies, what their goals were in Afghanistan and that sort of thing. The administration relented and did start giving interviews to Al Jazeera, but those incidents were watched very carefully--journalists around the world have told us this--they were watched very carefully.

Putin, for example, or people in his administration, have talked about the way the United States is controlling or trying to influence the media and have spoken about it very approvingly, perhaps we should learn some lessons from that. The rhetoric of the anti-terrorism war we see picked up by leaders in different countries. Mugabe in Zimbabwe and his information minister Jonathan Moyo are the worst examples of this. They literally call journalists terrorists now and that makes it a lot easier for them to detain them.

Access, the very, very limited access that journalists had in trying to cover the war in Afghanistan; this is something that Russia has been doing for years with Chechnya. All weıve done is tell them, that's okay, go ahead, limit reporters going there. If you want to go cover the war in Chechnya you are supposed to register with the Russian military, travel with them and see only what they want you to see. There's another whole side to that war. You don't get it if you travel with the Russian military. But, by imposing such a restrictive regime in Afghanistan, the U.S. is telling Putin and other leaders that this is a wonderful pattern, this is just fine.

Uzbekistan has one of the worst press freedom records in the world. Actually, all of central Asia is a dismal place for press freedom. It's now suddenly become very geographically important to the United States as part of the war on terrorism and we and other organizations that deal with human rights issues see a kind of slacking off in U.S. criticism. If these countries are so important in the war on terrorism, how willing is the U.S. government going to be to speak up and criticize their record on press freedom or on human rights? These are just some of the examples that we're seeing and the journalists that we're talking with every day say that they very definitely have an impact.

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Noreen Ahmed-Ullah's Remarks  |  Ann Cooper's Remarks  |  Tony Lewis's Remarks  |  Q&A