andersen-ottaway lecture

2001 Andersen Lecture
Louis D. Boccardi
President and Chief Executive Officer, The Associated Press

Tariff On Truth - Where The Press Isn't Free, Correspondents Pay The Price

Thank you, Andy, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Andy, thank you for those very generous and mostly undeserved remarks. I do have to do some­thing, though, about this recitation of my newspaper history. None of those papers exist anymore. I come across like a deck hand on the Titanic when you do it that way. But I do appreciate the invitation to be with you today. It’s a little bit scary to stand here to deliver the Andersen Lecture and look out and anywhere my eye stops, I see somebody else from our business, our profession, if I may, who has more right to be up here giving this lecture than I do. But you’ve asked me, or more precisely, Jim Ottaway asked me, and I’m here.

In a roomful of note-takers and control freaks - I refer to the editors, I don’t want any of the diplomats or others here to take that wrong - I want to make the record quite clear. Jim Ottaway extended this invitation to me on November 30th in the year 2000. Is he anywhere in the room? No. Since the World Press Freedom Committee, which he chairs, is devoted to the truth, I do accept his explanation that he’s ill. 

Teasing aside, I know you all join me, and I hope, Marilyn, you will convey to Jim our wish that he recover quickly and be back with us again swiftly.

I am both delighted and honored to be here. I’m delighted because I see so many friends there and here, and honored because the roster of previous Andersen lecturers is an honor roll of advocates of free speech and of freedom itself.

I’m flattered to somehow have stumbled into being cast among that group, and if I may add yet another happy circumstance of my standing here, this gives me an opportunity to take just a few seconds of my brief remarks today to offer a personal salute to the valuable work of the World Press Freedom Committee.

The Committee’s mission speaks to an essential freedom. It supports the fundamental right of people everywhere to think and to speak freely, and to know the truth about the forces that influence their lives.

To that end, you and the many other groups whose activities are coordinated with you provide much appreciated support to all journalists, but especially to those in places where organizations like yours are all the protection that they have.

AP considers itself both a partner in and a beneficiary of this work.

As a global news agency, we must practice our professional creed of fairness, accuracy and completeness as best we can make it. We practice it in environ­ments that vary from hospitable to hostile, from pleasant to perilous. 

In thinking about the range of places in which we operate, I remember several years ago a government appointment that brought me up short. Someone was appointed to the combined post of minister of education, information and prisons. My first reaction was that this might very efficiently serve to eliminate the middleman.

You have laughed politely, and I thank you for indulging me in that small joke as a prelude to a serious talk about the serious business of a free press. There’s little to laugh about in the difficulties that abound, less so than ever in the troubled days since early September.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the start of what President Bush has said will be a long global war against terrorism, have created heightened challenges for all of us. 

The dangers were great enough before September 11th.

The past ten years have been, by far, the most lethal decade in history for reporters and editors. More than 1,300 journalists have been killed on the job or because of it since the 18th Century, according to figures compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations. Of those 1,300, 458 died in the 1990’s alone. 

That proportion, more than a third, resonates tragically with AP’s own experience across its 153-year history. The faces of 26 members of the AP staff adorn the photo gallery on a memorial wall at our headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Twenty-six since 1848, and nine of the 26 have died on assignment since 1993. 

That death rate far exceeds the casualties in our ranks during the organized large-scale combat of either world war, or of Korea or Vietnam.

Why? Well, there are some practical explanations that I know many of you are familiar with. We at AP have experienced them all too closely and understand them all too well. 

The three most recent AP news people killed were all part of our video news production units, television news people. They were Myles Tierney and Miguel Gil, both gunned down from ambush by rebels in Sierra Leone, and Kerem Lawton, struck last March by a mortar round on the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. Three young, talented, dedicated journalists doing what we do, going where the story took them. 

Of the nine AP staffers lost since 1993, all but two were either video or still photographers. 

Their job is to capture the living image of news events. You have to be there. Photojournalists and their cameras must be witnesses themselves.

So no matter what measures we take to assure their safety - and many of you have been involved in those efforts for the profession at large, and we take many and seek continually to improve them - the risk is generally greatest for still and video photographers assigned to violent stories.

Moreover, obviously, photojournalists’ equipment makes them conspicuous.

But this sort of explanation falls well short of accounting for the 458 deaths that have been counted in the 1990s. Most of the victims were not carrying cameras. Many were not even on assignment when they died. Some were targeted and hunted down in their offices or even their homes, dead on a different battlefield but surely martyrs for the press freedom that lures you to lunch today.  

The best overall explanation for this deadly spike in journalists’ deaths may be one offered by Anthony Collings in a recent book called “Words of Fire.” Collings once worked for us, and later worked for The Wall Street Journal and also Newsweek and CNN.

He writes that reporters enjoy relative safety where there is press freedom ... and also where there is no press freedom at all, where the news industry is state- owned or state-controlled. 

The greatest danger, Collings writes, is in places where there’s a transition under way between suppres­sion and freedom, where democracy has gotten a foothold and the government’s grip on information is loosening. Such places were multiplying quickly as the 20th century came to an end.

Relying on information gathered by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Collings says nearly 40 percent of the world’s population now lives in these so-called “battleground” or transitional countries. They are battlegrounds for press freedom, battlegrounds, as well, for many other issues.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that reporters and editors began dying in record numbers at about the time the Cold War ended and pent-up demands for freedom suddenly found room to breathe and to speak. 

As long-suppressed grievances or aspirations for press freedom resurface, the journalists are always there, as they must be. It’s not a safe spot to be. The old restraints on reporting may be weakened, may be eliminated, and we know that a vigorous free press is a prerequisite to the emergence of stronger, healthier, more democratic institutions. 

But until those institutions are in place, a free press is also an endangered press. 

The danger seems to have been at its peak in the mid 1990s. The CPJ reports that 72 journalists were killed in 1994, and there were 173 imprisoned across the world.  The most deadly places were not just in third world countries like Sierra Leone or Rwanda, but also Russia, where CPJ reported 27 news people have died in the last eight years.

Last year, though, the number of reporters and editors behind bars was down to 81, and the worldwide death toll was 24. It is very difficult for anyone in this room, very difficult anywhere, to call this good news ... but even if you wanted to argue that those numbers suggest that journalists may be a bit safer, we know that in many places, journalism continues in peril.

Assaults and intimidation can be just as effective in suppressing the truth as arrests and assassinations.

Nor are governments the only enemies of truth who are willing and able to resort to such tactics in a world without Cold War restraints. Drug lords and guerrillas have helped turn Colombia into a place where only the bravest and most determined local journalists dare to practice their trade. 

Reporters and columnists from other conflict- plagued lands have been harassed and threatened and suffered for their journalism, even when they worked and published outside their own countries. 

Some governments have other tools at their command. Sedition laws, criminal libel laws, Latin America’s infamous desacato or contempt laws. All are available for use against truthful reporting in some countries. 

So is the time-honored authoritarian tactic of controlling the news by limiting reporters’ access to people, to places and to information. It is censorship by denial of access rather than censorship by the blue pencil, or whatever we could say passes for a blue pencil in our electronic age.

Of course, national security interests and the needs of law enforcement have created conflicts with news reporting, even here in the United States, a beacon of constitutionally protected press freedom and of open government.  

So we find ourselves today in a difficult moment amid such tensions. The lines get a little harder to see.

As has been remarked by so many post-September 11th, the military challenges abroad and the security threats at home are of a type and scope never seen in or by this country before. 

We live in a society that prizes the free flow of information, a society that’s in the midst of a period of explosive growth in our capacity to distribute and consume vast quantities of information. After September 11th, inevitably, the government seeks to keep useful information out of the hands of its adversaries.

For our part, we in the news business are finding that we must seek a new balance between our vigorous advocacy of open government and our understanding as responsible citizens that the nation is now in a fight in which information and openness can be weapons used against us.

It has seemed almost axiomatic that, as First Amendment advocates, we should oppose any government effort to hide its proceedings, to conduct proceedings in secret or to push the limits of its powers beyond the boundaries drawn in the Bill of Rights. 

Most of us lined up, I think rightfully so, to cite two examples, on the side of Vanessa Leggett, the writer jailed in Houston for contempt of court after refusing to turn over source material for a book she was writing about a highly publicized murder trial. Her incarceration is now approaching 100 days. That’s far longer, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, than any American journalist has ever been held in such a case. 

In August, we at AP were supported by many of our media colleagues, some of whom I see here in this room, in expressing outrage over the Justice Depart­ment’s seizure of the personal phone records of John Solomon, the assistant chief of our Washington Bureau. 

John wrote a story last spring that quoted unidentified law enforcement officials with some material about Senator Torricelli. 

The Justice Department clearly ignored its own rules for investigations involving members of the news media to take what we regarded, and said so publicly, as an extraordinary action.

It was a comfort to have so many of our colleagues raise their voices in protest with ours.

That was in August.

And then came September 11th. 

Let me just say parenthetically that in my admittedly engaged perspective, the news media of this country served the nation and the world extremely well that day and in the days thereafter. And it’s reassuring to see that verdict reflected in many of the public opinion polls taken in recent weeks.

I would just ask you to indulge me in greeting two people who are here from the leadership of our Washington Bureau, whose work I’m very proud of - our bureau chief, Sandy Johnson, and her deputy, Terry Hunt. Sandy’s here, and Terry’s over there. Thank you, and thank the people who work for you and for us. 

Some of those surveys, though, also reflect public concern about disclosures that might compromise national security. Vast majorities in some of the surveys I’ve seen say they’re willing to see some type of restrictions on that type of reporting.

And there, in just a few words, is the challenge of wartime, any wartime, for a free press - and for a democratic government that depends on the will and support of its people. You add to that the nature of the new conflict and it’s not hard to understand why this passage is so journalistically difficult. 

It would be foolish, presumptuous, of me to stand here today and try to suggest to you, to an audience as sophisticated as this one, exactly what each of us ought to be doing as we steer through this passage.

For now, let me say simply that we can’t forget that it remains the job of a free press to report as fully and as fairly as it knows how, and to do that in ways that properly balance all the other values that have to be considered - not the least of them national security.

While newspapers have increased their news holes and the airwaves for weeks have been full of the story of September 11th and its aftereffects, it’s absolutely clear that we’re all operating in a different and much tighter information environment.

Access to military activities is limited. Even here in this city, information is more difficult to come by. I don’t think there’s a reporter or editor in town who would disagree with that. 

After the Gulf War, many members of the press worked with the Pentagon to develop principles and access policies for war coverage. I was one of those who met with then-Defense Secretary Cheney to help fashion an agreement that laid down nine principles that we regarded as workable guidelines. They seemed, at the time, to offer the promise of better coverage than the Gulf War pools yielded, and they remain in place. 

The other day, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said, and I quote, “In our democracy, the work of the Pentagon press corps is important. Defending our freedom and way of life is what this conflict is all about, and that certainly includes freedom of the press.” A sentiment that it’s impossible to dissent from.  

That our tasks - never really simple in a complicated world - have become immensely more difficult since September 11, does not excuse us from the duty to perform them. 

Meanwhile, the struggle for press freedom, which lies at the core of the World Press Freedom Committee’s mission, goes on as it did before to meet these new challenges. 

There were already armed conflicts, contested borders and threatened regimes, shifting lines of power, struggles for new democracy - all with the potential for peril to the free flow of information, all before September 11. 

I would encourage the Committee to help these brave people as you have done. The World Press Freedom Committee has been steadfast in doing precisely that. May it ever be so. Thank you.