Fighting Words

FIGHTING WORDS
[SOURCE: Slate, AUTHOR: Jack Shafer]
[Commentary] About a year ago, Salon's Eric Boehlert and The Nation's Eric Alterman argued in separate pieces that the Bush administration was waging "war" against the press. This week, Alterman revisits his thesis to include FBI efforts to inspect and sanitize columnist Jack Anderson's papers before George Washington University catalogs and makes them publicly available. Over the weekend, the New York Times' Adam Liptak gave credence to the idea of a war in his Page One Sunday piece about using leak investigations and other techniques to criminalize national-security reporting. Boehlert, Alterman, and other administration critics assert a lockdown on and manipulation of information the likes of which we've not seen since the Nixon administration. But rather than crying "war" over the Bush-press disputes, I subscribe to Jay Rosen's more modest idea that the Bushies ambition was to "decertify" the press from its modern role as purveyor of news and portray it as just another special interest.
http://www.slate.com/id/2140916/