The Committee to Protect Journalists and other groups are issuing urgent appeals for the release of more than 40 journalists who have been arrested and are being held in Iran.

Scant information about the arrests has been released. One of those being held is Iason Athanasiadis, a 2008 Nieman fellow who is said to have been taken into custody June 20 at a Tehran airport as he was attempting to leave the country.

Athanasiadis has reported extensively in Iran, elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia. Last year, after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he wrote on Pakistan for Nieman Watchdog.

The arrests of so many journalists are part of a massive crackdown; aside from the brutal repression of street protests, more than 200 dissenting politicians, campaign workers, university professors and students have been imprisoned.

One Web site, payvand.com, lists the names of some journalists who are being held and urges sending email appeals for their release to the chief religious and judicial leaders in Iran. The site gives these email addresses and suggested salutations:

Leader of the Islamic Republic:
Ayatollah Sayed ‘Ali Khamenei
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Islamic Republic Street – End of Shahid Keshvar Doust Street, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: info_leader@leader.ir
via website:
http://www.leader.ir/langs/en/index.php?p=letter (English)
http://www.leader.ir/langs/fa/index.php?p=letter (Persian)
Salutation: Your Excellency, Ayatollah

Head of the Judiciary:
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Howzeh Riyasat-e Qoveh Qazaiyeh (Office of the Head of the Judiciary)
Pasteur St., Vali Asr Ave., south of Serah-e Jomhouri, Tehran 1316814737, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: shahroudi@dadgostary-tehran.ir (In the subject line write: FAO Ayatollah Shahroudi)
Salutation: Your Excellency

A journalist who witnessed the protests in Iran first-hand is Roger Cohen of the New York Times. Click here for an online item in which he responds to readers’ questions.

Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter.

The unanswered question is, why was he fired? He loved his work and developed a very large following.

The Post hasn’t given any good reason. As editor of Nieman Watchdog I’ve worked closely with Froomkin for 5-1/2 years, and I certainly can’t think of one. The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote in his blog Thursday that editors wouldn’t comment and referred him to a PR person. She issued a statement that one of Alexander’s blog readers said was baffling, Stalin-like and Orwellian. It was all of those:

“Editors and our research teams are constantly reviewing our online content to ensure we bring readers the most value when they are on our Web site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Regrettably, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced to The Post’s Web site.”

Late Thursday the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, issued a statement that Alexander added to his post, saying, “With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision.”

Froomkin is well-known online and his firing drew a quick, shocked reaction. By Friday morning more than 225 readers had appended comments to Alexander’s blog, the great majority of them infuriated with the firing.

Froomkin’s column is slated to run until late June or early July. He mentioned his firing in this morning’s piece, saying, “I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the readers who have e-mailed, blogged, commented, tweeted and left notes on my Facebook page. Your kind words and support mean the world to me.”

A Google search shows numerous articles on the firing.

The headline on Glenn Greenwald’s blog in Salon was, “The Post fires its best columnist. Why?”

“What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry,” Greenwald wrote, “is that Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 3 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns.”

A veteran journalist and Washington insider has completed an empirical study of the elite press’s performance in the run-up to and early days of the Iraq war and – big surprise – has found it badly wanting.

Leslie H. Gelb, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, concludes that American’s finest journalists failed to even minimally evaluate administration claims. “For the most part, the elite print press conveyed Administration pronouncements and rationale without much critical commentary,” he writes.

Gelb and assistant Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati focused specifically on the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. They coded 576 news and opinion articles from three key moments in 2002 and 2003, using the following scale:

0: A story is entirely slanted, suppresses skepticism, and is completely supportive of the Administration line
1: A story is somewhat slanted to the Administration’s side, with skeptical and questioning sentences over-weighted by supportive ones
2: A story dutifully reports both sides by balancing experts or political leaders
3: A story raises questions about official statements and events and generally projects skepticism
4: A story casts fundamental doubt on Administration explanations, policies, and claims
5: A story casts fundamental doubt and then reports the Administration’s reaction to such doubt

Gelb writes he would have been satisfied with a solid three. But he ended up giving the elite press scores in the high ones and low twos. Some of the examples he cites, from the likes of Karen DeYoung, David Sanger, Richard Cohen, Jim Hoagland, Michael Gordon, Richard Wolffe and Daniel Klaidman, Bill Keller and Vernon Loeb are enough to make you weep.
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In good time for consideration of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the May 25 issue of The New Yorker magazine offers a detailed report on John Roberts, the Chief Justice appointed by George W. Bush.

The article is written by staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, author of “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” A careful investigation of Roberts’s four-year record affirms that the present Republican demand that only neutral judges should sit on the High Court is — well, balderdash.

Roberts is shown as smart, well-versed in the law, but anything but neutral. When push comes to shove, as Toobin points out, Roberts has revealed himself not as the “humble moderate” he painted himself when he appeared as a nominee before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but rather as a doctrinaire conservative. In case after case Toobin shows “Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”

This should come as no surprise. Roberts served as associate counsel in the Reagan administration, eagerly supporting the idea that it was time to reverse “the excesses of lilberalism.” Toobin calls him “a loyal foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is quoted as saying, “The Chief Justice talks the talk of moderation while walking the walk of extreme conservatism.”
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What would you do if you — and your 32 camera crews — were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill?

There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually make decisions? What if anything changes his mind? What blows his cool? How does he settle disputes among his advisers? Who is the last one to whisper in his ear? How does he treat his staff? How furious is the competition for his attention? Who wins? Why is he so sure, so confident, that thinking big is the solution to every problem? How do he and his staff really feel about the mess Bush left them? How does the former constitutional law professor reconcile his devotion to civil liberties with a handful of recent decisions that have horrified civil libertarians? Does he have second thoughts?

But sadly those were not the sorts of things that seemed to interest anchor Brian Williams and the more than two dozen NBC News producers responsible for the “Inside the Obama White House” special showing last night and tonight, a show that treats Obama like a celebrity rather than a president.

Part of the problem, most assuredly, was that the White House had the ultimate say in what the cameras were allowed to record, and what they weren’t. As Williams says at the show’s outset: “Our job is to show as much as we can of the inner workings, especially of the West Wing. The job of the White House is to show us what they want us to see.”

And yet what seems to fascinate Williams the most is what everyone is eating. There are, it turns out, apples and M&Ms all over the White House. In fact, the show devotes a whole montage to people pouring, throwing and consuming M&Ms. And the high point of the day, the centerpiece of the hour-long show last night, what Williams calls Obama’s “brief shining moment,” is a hokey, obviously staged burger run to Five Guys. The cameras literally languish over greasy paper bags full of french fries.

It’s the kind of substanceless fawning that leads some to conclude that the press is soft on Obama. But this show wasn’t about his politics or his policies. It was a celebration and amplification of the star power of the presidency in general, and of this president in particular. Simply showing him eating a burger they apparently consider great television.

And tonight, we’re promised an interview with Bo the dog.

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The stenographic, invasion-enabling reporting of the run-up to the U.S. war in Iraq had a precedent of sorts in World War I. The story emerges in “A Farewell to Arms,” a review in the June 11th New York Review of Books of British author Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 (Basic Books, 454 pp., $30).

The central figure was the commander of the Italian army, General Luigi Cadorna, “a strutting authoritarian of epic incompetence, even by the high standards set by his British and French counterparts,” writes reviewer Max Hastings, a former editor of London’s The Daily Telegraph and The Evening Standard. Under Cadorna Italy “lost substantially more soldiers in proportion to its population–689,000 from 35 million–than did Britain, which counted 745,000 battle dead out of 46 million.”

By no means were all lost to the Austrian enemy. “As Italian morale flagged, Cadorna, the Duke of Aosta, and other commanders introduced arbitrary executions as a means of inducing their men to keener effort,” writes Hastings. “Decimation, the practice of shooting men chosen by nomination or by lots from regiments that were deemed to have displayed insufficient determination or signs of mutiny, became commonplace in 1917.

“When Italian commanders perceived their men to be surrendering too readily, they began to treat all those who fell into Austrian hands as putative traitors. The authorities prevented parcels of food and comforts dispatched by families from being forwarded to POWs. Around 100,000 Italian soldiers died in Austrian captivity, almost one in six of those taken prisoner.”

Yet Thompson found journalists “who systematically glorified Cadorna in return for access to his armies, and who told their readers nothing of the epic incompetence with which the war was being fought,” continues Hastings. “The author blames the absence of skeptical press scrutiny for the fact that the commander in chief was able to bungle on for so long, and to inflict such tragedies on his own people.

“Such famous and mendacious correspondents as Luigi Barzini, an ardent supporter of Cadorna, betrayed their calling and their country, as did most of their British and French contemporaries. In a great war, censorship of operational information is inescapable. But governments and commanders almost always find it irresistible to extend this to shield their own follies.” At this point Hastings injects a hopeful note: “Significant lessons were learned from the shameful press experience of the democracies in World War I, so that in the 1939-1945 conflict the American and British media provided somewhat sharper criticism of inadequate generals,weapons, equipment, and tactics.”

Frank Rich’s take in the May 10 Times on the plight of the newspaper business concluded that, if the public wants in-depth news content, it will have to finance it. In Rich’s words, “…the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.”

Actually, the public has been paying for news. Paid daily newspaper circulation tops 34 million, with more than 42 million on Sunday. That’s considerably less than even 10 years ago, but clearly significant numbers of Americans still recognize the value of print news and are willing to dig into their pockets to support it.

Those numbers are in spite of a business model that seems to be based on the idea that readers are dummies not to be trusted with financial information about the publications they buy. Almost never do editors and publishers explain the facts of newspaper business life to their reader-customers. You can find out how a public newspaper company’s newspaper division does by studying the company’s annual report, but financial facts about individual papers in the division are well-guarded secrets. Seldom, if ever, will a paper disclose its profit margin or how much its news gathering costs, what it pays employees or what it spends on sports coverage or editorial pages or for virtually anything else concerning content.

The silence prevails despite the press’s never-tiring references to the public’s right to know. Not long ago an acquaintance in Des Moines challenged the Des Moines Register’s management to disclose basic financial information, such as how revenues are allocated between profits and editorial. He ran into a stone wall, and his efforts to pose the question in a letter to the editor and op-ed piece were rejected.
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The White House Correspondents Association annual dinner, which takes place tomorrow night, is an orgy of self-congratulation, the ultimate black-tied manifestation of the dangerous coziness between Washington’s journalistic elites and the people they cover.

Its defining moment came in 2006, when attendees responded with stunned, sullen incomprehension as comedian Stephen Colbert delivered a magnificently brutal critique of a delusional president and his stenographic courtiers.

And whatever public-service function the dinner ever served has been entirely subsumed by the unseemly competition over which “news” organization can bring the most shockingly inappropriate celebrity guests.

But it doesn’t have to be quite so gross. And it shouldn’t be. An event that is widely seen as defining of the White House press corps — at which the main attraction, no matter who is in the audience, will always be the guaranteed presence of the president of the United States — should hold itself to a higher standard.

Things really went downhill when the organizers a few years back apparently made a conscious decision to reward groups whose guests added to the Vegas-like glam of the event, at the expense of lower-key news organizations that could actually use the evening for source development.
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As a former reporter and journalism professor I am naturally inclined to think highly of the right of free speech. Still, I can’t help applauding what the British government did when it slammed the door on Michael Savage and his ilk. Savage is an American radio host who spouts some of the ugliest and most hateful speech imaginable – and under the cover of our Yankee freedoms not only gets away with it but is handsomely paid to do so..

The Washington Post reports that British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith barred Savage along with a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and several Muslim extremists from entering the country. She said she made the names public to show the kind of behavior that Britain is “not willing to have in this country.”

Smith describes Savage as someone who “foments hatred,” the kind that could rouse inter-community tensions and violence. “Coming to the UK is a privilege,” she said, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values to undermine our way of life.”

It’s a mystery to me why in the U.S. where much is made of the fact that smoking is bad for your health, and where bacteria in peanut butter and on spinach are cause for alarm, toxic fumes emanating from the airwaves are tolerated without fuss. Poison is poison, whether it comes in the shape of salmonella or hate speech, and it’s as much an abuse of our American standards and values as it is that of the Brits.

Unfortunately, we seem unable to do anything about it here until we can shame the proprietors who sell these products. Those who grant access to the hate-spouters are plainly more interested in making a profit than acting responsibly – yet another example of the twisted excess to which those in power can be tempted by a search for more dollars.

As for what the Brits did, it’s nice to see that somewhere, somebody is willing to take a stand against this odious stuff. Now Savage says he will do what any other American would do. He plans to sue. I imagine Her Majesty’s government will have a field day with that. I’m booking my seat at the Old Bailey.

Education matters.

That is the message from President Barack Obama, especially to those who think the economy is challenge enough. But even a president with a message will become distracted by events — by swine flu or torture memos or instability in Pakistan.

You need only look at last week’s Presidential press conference to know that education queries won’t soon jump to the head of the line.

Communities in crisis can’t wait.

So a recent breakfast forum in Charlotte, N.C., took the theme “education matters,” to try to figure out how a school system that was once singled out as a national big-city jewel can head off challenges that threaten it. What kinds of challenges? For starters, achievement gaps between races and socioeconomic groups and a shrinking budget.

Superintendent Peter Gorman heads Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, a system that is straining to cope with cuts while serving 137,000 students. It is projected that the number of schools where at least 75 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunches will grow from 35 to 59 by August when the school year begins. It’s a statistic that a troubled economy only accelerates, particularly in a city with a hard-hit banking industry.

Gorman recently turned down an invitation from his friend, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to join his team in Washington. On a panel at the forum — organized by the independent, nonprofit Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education (MeckEd) — Gorman restated his commitment to offer the opportunities that every child deserves. He and his wife, Sue, have been active on community boards since Gorman came to Charlotte in July 2006. They have a daughter, Katie, who attends public schools.
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