Tag: freedom of the press

The American Press and a New Fourth Estate

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Anna Politkovskaya

On September 1, 2004, a middle-aged Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya boarded a plane in Moscow on her way to Ossetia to cover a hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. During the flight, she drank a cup of tea that almost killed her. After she drank the tea, she became disoriented, began to vomit, and ultimately lost consciousness. She was taken to a hospital in Rostov-on-Don, where doctors concluded she had been poisoned.

Politkovskaya had been reporting on the human rights abuses in Russia and Chechnya for some time and was a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin. In one of her books she had written, “If you live in Russia, you cannot help but notice that Putin’s Russia is a world of violence, lies, and injustice.”

Throughout her career, Politkovskaya received death threats and was heavily surveilled by the Russian government. But the intimidation didn’t stop her, and she wrote hundreds of articles for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta and several books highly critical of Putin. In her 2004 book, Putin’s Russia, she bravely wrote about the corruption, human rights abuses, and oligarchy in Russia with an unflinching style.

In short, she was a daring, hardworking investigative journalist who risked her life to write about the cruel and criminal aspects of Russia. She was assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, 2006—Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Read more »

Monday, July 5, 2021

Mississippi to Mussolini: Our Weak Hold on American Democracy

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Where I live in Colorado there are unstable elements of the landscape that sometimes fail. In severe cases, millions of tons of rock, silt, sand, and mud can shift, leading to massive landslides. The signs aren’t always evident because the breakdown in the structural geology often happens quietly underground. The invisible changes can take hundreds or thousands of years, but when a landslide takes place, it is fast and violent. And the new landscape that comes after is unrecognizable.

Democracies, like landscapes, take time to erode and the erosion isn’t always obvious to those living within its structure. Seemingly small things like villainizing the press, vicious attacks on political candidates, gerrymandering districts, voter suppression, and allowing vast amounts of money to enter the campaign process are all erosive forces that, taken individually, don’t seem like much. But taken together, over time, they break down democracies and invite darker forms of government.

When you start to speak about democracy in this country, it can get wispy and abstract in a hurry. Most of us were taught about democracy as school children in breathless, fabled terms. It’s hard to get past the myths of our founders and our founding to consider both how young and how clunky our democracy really is. For perspective, the oldest tree in the country is a bristlecone pine named Methuselah that sits in eastern California and had its beginning as a seed over 4,000 years before the convention in Philadelphia that hot summer of 1787. We think of our democracy as about 230 years old from the time when the Constitution was signed and George Washington first took office. But it’s only been 156 years since African Americans were freed and only about 100 years since women were guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. So our true democracy, at least on paper, is really only about 100 years old, closer to the lifespan of a cottonwood tree. And yet just 100 years into it, since the day when everyone was theoretically given the right to vote, things in the United States are wobbling and teetering. Read more »