State Persecution

Reporters Without Borders voiced dismay at the sentence of two years in prison and two years loss of civil rights handed down today by a court in Bijie in the southwestern province of Guizhou on journalist Li Yuanlong of the Bijie Ribao daily newspaper for “inciting subversion of the state” in articles he posted on the Internet. The organisation also condemned the way the authorities took Li’s...

At a rally outside the New York Times's office last night, protesters called on the government to "prosecute" the newspaper for its recent publication of government security secrets. Led by a radio talk show host and Caucus for America president, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, almost 100 people gathered on 43rd Street to voice their outrage at the Times's decision to publish "national security secrets...

WASHINGTON - The red camera light blinked on, and news anchor Jennifer Gray began speaking: "In Iraq ..." Her face and words flashed via satellite from an Alexandria studio around the world. But, Gray isn't a TV reporter on NBC, CNN or FOX. She's a Navy petty officer who anchors a news show on the Pentagon Channel. Gray and her colleagues report to audiences as close as the barracks at Quantico...

Republican lawmakers who think attacking the New York Times could help carry them to victory in 2006 might want to consider how that tactic played for the party's presidential nominee a decade ago. In the final stretch of the 1996 campaign, the former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, unleashed an unexpectedly bitter series of assaults on the newspaper. "We're not going to let the media steal this...

The recent disclosure of a secret databank operation by the federal government that tracks terrorist financing has prompted calls to punish reporters and newspapers involved in the disclosure of a confidential anti-terrorist program. The ire comes principally from supporters of President Bush's administration, who believe the press has no business exposing sensitive information when terrorism...

On June 1, 1972, White House Counsel Charles Colson wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, saying, "I hate the (New York) Times as much as anyone else and would like to be in the first wave of Army shock troops going in during the second term to tear down the printing presses." Colson and Haldeman hated the Times because the newspaper had more credibility than...

Reaction was fast and furious to last Sunday's column in which I praised The New York Times for publishing information about the Bush administration's secret monitoring of a vast database of international financial transactions. In the column, I was critical of the president and his supporters for "declaring war" on The Times and the media in general, and I stated that this was one war that Bush...

When The New York Times published a story about a secret government program to find terrorists by monitoring financial transactions, conservatives responded as if the paper had given Osama bin Laden the keys to a missile silo. The story, asserted President Bush, "does great harm to the United States of America." Vice President Dick Cheney said the Times and other newspapers "have made the job of...

When President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several members of Congress recently fired broadsides at The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and, to a degree, The Wall Street Journal for publishing detailed accounts of a somewhat secret counterterrorism program, it was the mightiest political salvo at the press since Maryland's Spiro T. Agnew threatened the big three television networks...

Sometimes lies should be called what they are. "Since publishing a highly controversial story about a secret U.S. program that monitors financial transactions as a tool to fight terrorism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller... has admitted that the liberal press is not 'neutral' in this war on terror. "Indeed, the track record proves the New York Times and Bill Keller are not 'neutral'...