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“Journalists are one of the groups of people
that hold the key to the world. They have the power to control what people think.”
-Jaimita Haskell, 18
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“Young people don't control the media,” says Jaimita Haskell,
18, is a reporter for Radio Rookies, an initiative run for and by
young people at WNYC public radio in New York. “But youth media
is growing and it has to continue, because we're dying at
a rapid pace, physically, emotionally and mentally. Some teens
don't know we have a voice or that it matters when we speak.”
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“I would be going to jail
for a story I didn't write,
for reasons which I don't
know, for something
which may not actually
have been a crime.”
-Judith Miller, 57
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Under the current judicial and political administration in the
USA, it is possible for a journalist to be imprisoned for not writing
a story. In July 2005, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was
sent to jail for refusing to reveal her sources for an article she was
researching–but didn't publish–about CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Plame's name was published by right-wing columnist Robert Novak
(below), probably because her husband Joseph Wilson had publicly
contradicted White House claims that Saddam Hussein had bought
uranium in Africa. Though it's a federal crime to leak an undercover
CIA operative's name, neither Novak nor any government official has
been prosecuted. Miller's treatment is hardly setting a good example:
The Committee to Protect Journalists cites two cases where press
freedom has been restricted–including the imprisonment of a
publisher in Cameroon–with the justification that if “the land of
the free” is now persecuting journalists for not revealing sources,
everyone else can, too.The right not to reveal sources is also
frequently challenged in Italian courts by rulings that allow
journalists' homes and offices to be searched. This violates article
10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans the
practice unless justified by a “pressing social need.”
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“I have been kept under surveillance by Scientology
and harassed in a number of ways: [by them] stealing
my garbage, lodging false complaints of drug smuggling
at customs and spreading gossip.”
-Luiz Erlanger
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We wanted to tell you that the Church of Scientology is fond
of suing people, but we might get sued. In the past, the Church
hasn't hesitated to pursue publications and individuals in the
courts, as well as outside the courtroom. That is according to
several reporters who have written about the Church and then
accused it of, among other things, sending a private detective after
them, obtaining personal credit reports, and making obscene
phone calls. Instead, then, we'll publish an extract from the ruling
of a 1995 case brought by the Church's Religious Technology Center
(RTC) against US newspaper the Washington Post and two of its
journalists for publishing apparently copyrighted Church texts. It
says what we can't, better than we could. “The Court finds that the
motivation of plaintiff in filing this lawsuit against the Post is
reprehensible. Although the RTC brought the complaint under
traditional secular concepts of copyright and trade secret law, it
has become clear that a much broader motivation prevailed–the
stifling of criticism of and dissent from the religious practices of
Scientology and the destruction of its opponents. L. Ron Hubbard,
the founder of Scientology, has been quoted as looking upon law
as a tool to '[h]arass and discourage rather than to win. The law
can be used very easily to harass and enough harassment on
somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing
that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his
professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.'”
The Church lost.
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