It's just another day for the GOP. I'm furious that I was ever a member.

Just another day for activist propaganda, you mean.

Amy wasn't arrested for "protesting", she was arrested for trying to free two "Democracy Now!" producers who had just been arrested on suspicion of riot. (This is according to the DN statement. http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2008/9/1/amy_goodman_and_two_democracy_now_producers_unlawfully_arrested_at_the_rnc)

A press pass is not a "get out of jail free card", and doesn't grant one immunity to the law. Nor is it evidence that you're not a protester taking part in a riot, they're not that hard to get. If you're caught in the getaway vehicle after a bank robbery, you can't wave a press pass and camera, claim you was only reporting on it, and expect them to just let you go. Same goes for a riot.

And if you think you've been wrongfully arrested, you call a lawyer to get oneself freed.

You have to bear in mind that the cops in the middle of a riot have good reason to fear for their safety, which is why they put such a premium on maintaining control of a situation, and why they take so seriously people not obeying their instructions, or continuing to argue and resist long after being told to stop. Anti-RNC protesters were recently in the news for throwing bleach on some of the delegates, as well as the usual business of smashing windows, slashing car tyres, and throwing bottles. They're not all of them nice people.

I don't know what happened here, and the edited footage of such events is notoriously unreliable. But it seems unwise to me to make definitive comments having seen only one side of the story, from one of the parties to the dispute. You would object if the police did it, so why is it OK to declare guilt-without-right-to-a-defence about the police?

Think of it like this, Aisha: if the BBC sent a cameraman to cover a demonstration and she was arrested for joining in, wouldn't BBC viewers be pretty surprised? How often do professional journalists riot? Have you ever heard of it happening? And these are not people who are unknown to me. I've been listening to their reports for years. Perhaps Amy's producers put down their cameras and started breaking windows and throwing bleach, but I think the odds are pretty low. And maybe Amy now believes she's above the law and decided to bust them out of police custody. But she's the journalist I trust most in the world, so I'm going to need quite a bit of persuading of that.

Would BBC viewers be surprised? I know a few who would not be. But any surprise surely would be at a journalist who got so close to the action as to get arrested, or acted so unprofessionally by resisting an arrest rather than cooperating quietly and sorting it out with lawyers later?

But in any case, it is likely that the cops are not fans of the show, and would not be aware of her upstanding reputation. All they know is that they're trying to enforce order in the middle of a riot, and somebody is getting in their way. A press pass and expensive camera cut no ice. Passes can be faked, stolen, handed over by partisan journalists, or even acquired legitimately by radical magazines or individual radical journalists. Abroad, a fair number of "professional journalists" have been arrested for assisting terrorists, having taken sides in the conflict they are reporting on.

Amy may well be perfectly clean - I do not know her so I can make no comment - but journalists as a profession are not, and the police know it.

I am not asking that you be convinced. I am suggesting that you consider that you have heard the story of only one side before coming to your conclusion. And that on at least one significant point - whether arrested for "protesting" or for trying to free an arrestee from police custody - that your story differs even from that of Democracy Now.

I see now that you are basing your judgement on your trust in the professionalism of the press. However, I do still think it would be useful for you to know in understanding these events that the police have reason not to share your trust.

Best wishes.

A.

Splutter! My 'trust in the professionalism of the press'? No, Aisha, that's not it at all. Nearly all press in the States are part of huge media conglomerates. They have excellent commercial reasons to buddy up with the Republican Party.

DN is the only regular news outlet in the States I have faith in. Did Amy's team believe there were WMD in Iraq? No. Because they had the relevant UN weapons inspectors on the show saying the chances were astronomically low. Almost everyone else just parroted the government line. DN are one of the few outlets who call the government to account on their excesses. It's not OK to lock them up just because they're in the vicinity of crime: they're reporters; it's their job to be there. And that's the point of press credentials: they should at least stop your presence seeming suspicious. And if they're fakeable, then what about the convention passes? If those too are fakeable it means letting impostors in to stand close to McCain. Surely you'll accept the heavily-vetted convention IDs are trustworthy, which sort of implies the press credentials aren't homemade. And saying, well, they can be let out to cover the story later, when it's over, isn't much use.

Democracies need to know what's going on. Otherwise voting is meaningless. Independent reporting is not optional; it's vital. I think your point is: why do I believe DN more than I believe the 'official' story. My point is: the purpose of DN is keep the official story honest. I have to believe someone and they've earned my trust (CNN, Fox, the NYT, etc have lost it).

I do not follow your reasoning as to why being part of a huge media conglomerate would make one support the Republicans. As I understand it, donations to political parties are recorded in America, and that this has indicated that the majority of the media's employees are liberal. There is other evidence, such as surveys of coverage of the two parties, and of their policies, that indicates the media are generally more liberal than the population as a whole.

Of course, political bias is relative, and everybody judges it with respect to their own position. But the idea that rich people who run big businesses are necessarily right-wing does not follow. Consider George Soros, or Hillary, or half of the other senior Democrats.

The issue of WMD in Iraq is a complicated topic. There were many media sources that I am aware of that expressed doubts. (Most frequently the left-wing ones, which suggests the difference was due to political bias as opposed to careful fact-finding.) If Amy's position was that the chances were astronomically low, then that does not impress me with her journalistic integrity, as the information available (then or now) is not sufficient to justify saying that. The issue is technical, and the media coverage across the board was very poor, so that's not a specific criticism of Amy. But if you were trying to convince me of the quality of her journalism, you picked a bad example.

I am making no criticism of Amy Goodman's journalistic reputation here. It is only one example, and one where nobody else did very well either.

It is not OK to lock anybody up for simply being in the vicinity of a crime. But it is if you have reason to suspect they took part in it. Without hearing the police's side of the story, neither of us can say if their reason was sufficient. Again, the press do not have absolute moral authority. They are private businesses that employ people who inevitably have their own personal politics. It is no more outrageous to suspect a reporter than a nurse, or a librarian, or a factory worker.
Or to suspect a policeman of brutality, for that matter.

On the subject of convention passes, you will have no doubt noted that the stage was approached twice by Code Pink protesters during the Republican Congress, before they were thrown out by security. In at least one of those cases, it was reportedly with a stolen identity.

I am very much in favour of independent reporting, from all political points of view. And of people recognising the potential for them being biased and learning how to evaluate them for accuracy. The hard part is not to accept whatever source most closely matches one's political preconceptions as being the most accurate, which is the natural human tendency. That is why it is important to make occasional contact with people of different political persuasions and exchange opinions. Those beliefs that survive this debate are the more likely to be correct.

Aisha, I think we're unlikely to agree because I think we have different views about how the world works. But the reason I say that US media corporations try not to upset the GOP is that they could only take on their current size when laws against media concentration were repealed in Reagan's time. If the FCC rules ever got put back to their 1970s forms Viacom and Clear Channel and others would need to be broken up. So how's that for an incentive not to do anything the GOP might view as abusing their partial monopoly? Secondly the Republicans have greatly reduced corporate taxation. And thirdly, all large media companies rely on ad revenue, which means they can't afford to upset the large businesses who advertise with them. And many large advertisers prefer a pro-Republican slant because this administration has been very kind to big business. The logging companies have been given increased stewardship of national forests, the drug companies have got the tort reform and price protection they asked for, the credit companies have received the changes to personal bankruptcy laws they wanted, vehicle and energy companies have been free from new emissions standards, polluters have had the Clean Air act they wanted, Wall Street has had the continued relaxation of the Glass-Steagal Acts, agriculture has had the bio-fuels initiative, the airline sector got bail-outs after 911 despite the fact they were in trouble before al qaeda came along, and so on. Almost every business sector in the US has a reason to prefer a Republican government, which means they are likely to object to the companies they buy ads from running stories hostile to the GOP. And when ad revenue is withheld, media companies often cave in. For these reasons I'm one of those who believe the reports which say the US media has a strong right-wing bias, not a left-wing one.

I think you're being a bit harsh by saying it doesn't count that DN got the WMD question right on the basis that no one really knew and thus it can't have been down to good reporting. Scott Ritter ran the UN weapons inspection team for most of the 90s. He supervised the destruction of those weapons. He devised the searches to see if any more WMD were being hidden. He was very well placed - perhaps best placed - to know what was there. (And, in case it matters, he was a Republican.) Amy had him on DN; other news channels weren't interested. Who better to know whether Iraq had WMD than the man who spent a decade answering that question on behalf of the international community? His book goes into a lot more detail and discusses what the US, UK and Israeli intelligence services were saying at the time. The US had almost no sources in Iraq; Israel had plenty (as you might imagine). Israel and MI6 thought there were no weapons; the CIA said there were, but could offer no proof then or since. Doesn't DN get even half a mark for laying all this out before the invasion?

I am sure you are right that we are not going to agree. That does not mean we cannot talk about it, does it?

Regarding the WMD, my point was that nobody can know if DN actually got the WMD question right. This is one of the many things that was poorly explained by the media. There was and never had been any way to locate them without the active cooperation (or gross carelessness) of the Iraqi regime - the most simple calculation shows this. They were legally required to provide that cooperation, which they provably did not, and it was that that led to action being taken.

For the WMD from the previous war that Saddam was supposed to have destroyed under UN supervision, we know they were still there because we found over 500 of them, (along with 1.7 tons of enriched uranium that we knew about but the UN inspectors had decided to let Saddam keep). The argument is over whether he had manufactured any more.

If they were secretly made and are there still, well hidden, we would not know. If they were there at the time but were subsequently moved out of the country, we would not know. All we know is that the records Saddam left undestroyed indicate his plan was to maintain the capability and re-arm immediately the sanctions were dropped, which of course is strategically (and legally) the same difference, and which could also easily be misinformation to hide what he was actually doing.

There are also a variety of tales from troops operating in Iraq about the barrels of cyclosarin left at arms dumps that kept setting their NBC detectors off, but which the authorities identified as pesticide. There are suspicions that Saddam was using dual-use technologies that had legitimate uses, but could quickly be adapted to military ones. That, however, is less thoroughly verified.

The main difficulty with arguing about WMD is that the claimed existence of newly manufactured stockpiles were never the issue. Both the UN resolutions and the military thinking about the strategic threat demanded that Saddam give up his WMD capability, specifically his ability to manufacture more within a matter of weeks to months. This was what the inspectors were given the run-around to hide - that Saddam had maintained the capability and was developing the capability to deliver them too. From a military point of view, this is just as significant as stockpiles would be.

However, neither the media nor the politicians thought the public could deal with this subtlety, so it was simplified and dramatised. The information on the real situation was out there if you carefully read all the detailed reports and technical documents, but most journalists did not, nor would have understood if they had.

(My apologies for the length of all that. I did say it was complicated.)

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Had any journalist laid all of this out before the war (the parts of it known then) and kept listeners up to date on the subsequent developments, I would be genuinely impressed. Is this what your Amy Goodman did?

And that, I think, is the point where we probably grind to a halt. To my way of thinking, DN did a great job because their early reports match what I think of as the truth that was eventually established about the WMD situation. But since you have a very different view of what the truth turned out to be, to you their reports will look quite inaccurate and misleading - and perhaps even like propaganda. To me, the official reasons given for invading Iraq were a pack of lies and I first learned that at DN. But to you, Saddam was a hostile enemy who maintained capabilities we could not afford to ignore - and no, you certainly won't find an old instalment of DN which lays out that story. If I'm right, and the current US administration is abusing its power and deceiving its citizens on the most weighty matters, then DN and similar outlets are doing a vitally important job. But if those accusations are really left-wing conspiracy theories, then DN are nothing but an arrogant nuisance. I say it's the former, but without a consensus on the way the world is, I don't see how we can agree on what trustworthy independent reporting looks like.

Up to a point. I agree that I differ on this particular story, but I would be cautious before drawing conclusions based on one story that everybody else got wrong too.

And even if it proved typical, I would not classify them as an arrogant nuisance. An opposition is necessary to keep one's own prejudices honest, and one's arguments watertight. A court case has both a prosecution and a defence, because that gives a better chance of finding the truth. Consensus is a danger sign. I could only wish that they were rather better at it.