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The Myths Fueling Today’s Armed Right How the NRA seeded the storylines animating the violent groups that will be patrolling this year’s election

Please see the original article here including photos by Mark Peterson/Redux.

The 13 men charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called themselves the Wolverine Watchmen, a possible reference to the white supremacist vigilante militia in the HBO series Watchmen. The suspects began planning their kidnapping this summer, with live fire exercises and explosives, according to the charges. Not long before, gangs of armed men, many of them carrying AR-15s, and defiantly not wearing facemasks, protested inside the state capitol in Lansing against strict health measures imposed by Whitmer. Similar armed right-wing groups across the nation are planning to privately police polling sites on November 3, as President Donald Trump called for in the presidential debate in late September.

At first blush, it may seem hard to connect the various themes that crop up in recent stories about the armed right. There is, of course, the adamant assertion of their right to bear arms, but also a penchant for white supremacy (evidenced by their baleful presence at Black Lives Matter protests, and the online contempt they routinely hurl at the movement), a resistance to common sense public health measures meant to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic, and the specter of voter intimidation. But at a deeper level, what connects this powerful, and dangerous, set of attitudes and reflexes is a collection of myths that have spread like coronavirus mutations through social media, allowing the different groups of the armed right to perceive themselves as good guys fighting various historic evils.

Many of these myths can be traced back to the National Rifle Association, the once-powerful and now-waning guns rights organization that is in the midst of tearing itself apart. The NRA is in decline and in debt, laying off staff and losing members. The New York Attorney General’s office is seeking “to dissolve” the NRA over credible charges of massive embezzlement first raised by the NRA whistleblower Oliver North, the Reagan-era White House official at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. North, identified as “Dissident No. 1” in court documents, was backed by other NRA board directors, including the rock star Ted Nugent.

But even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups, some of which are neo-fascist—such as The Proud Boys, whom the president notoriously told to “stand back and stand by” at the first debate—or openly white supremacist, and some of which are not. They are united in their paranoia, and in their anti-government agenda, by one of the NRA’s grand theories: the “slippery slope.” The idea is that even a little gun control, like background checks, can start a dangerous slide in disarmament leading all the way to white genocide. Trump himself fuels the myth. “They call it the slippery slope, and all of sudden everything gets taken away,” he told reporters last summer, explaining his own reversal on background checks.

Even as the NRA teeters, its mythical spirit lives on, entering a welter of new right-wing groups.

For these armed groups, the slippery slope’s primary example is the Holocaust. In 2016 Nugent posted a graphic on his Facebook page featuring photos of prominent Jewish American leaders, each one next to an Israeli flag, calling them “punks” who “hate freedom” over their support for gun control. Within hours the Anti-Defamation League denounced Nugent, saying that “anti-Semitism has no place in the gun control debate.” Nugent then posted in response, “What sort of racist prejudiced POS [piece of shit] could possibly not know that Jews for gun control are Nazis in disguise?” Nugent was referring to the belief amongst gun activists and other conservatives across the country that the Nazis used gun control to disarm Europe’s Jews before they killed them.

Another example marshalled to bolster the slippery slope argument comes from the Reconstruction era. “I’m a Black American and I know that the NRA was started as a civil rights organization training Black Americans to arm themselves and defend themselves against the KKK,” said Candace Owens in 2018 on Fox News, announcing her membership in the NRA.

These gun myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust are both the work of the NRA. The first is a fabrication wholly invented by its modern leadership, while the second is an old trope that the NRA has endorsed and amplified. The NRA’s messages have spread through social media to animate gun activists nationwide. The work of one NRA-funded scholar, David B. Kopel, has appeared in newspapers like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, arguing that gun laws don’t work, usually without disclaimers reflecting the millions of dollars in NRA funding Kopel’s think tank, the Independence Institute, has received. The NRA’s rewriting of history continues to feed viral memes that appropriate the epic struggles of two historically persecuted minorities. These fantasies have saturated the Republican electorate to the point that the “slippery slope” is now embraced as gospel truth on the American right.

 

The NRA wasn’t always like this. For over a century, it was dedicated to riflery and the shooting sports. It was founded in New York City in 1871, during the peak of Reconstruction. Union Army veterans, most of whom were New York National Guard officers, formed the group to improve riflery among soldiers and able-bodied men in anticipation of future wars. They modeled their organization upon the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom, inaugurated 12 years before by Queen Victoria, and borrowed its namesake and target designs for their shooting range. In 1876, during the American centennial, the NRA added “of America” to its name to prevent “any international confusion.”

In 1977, in an internal uprising that today’s NRA leaders pretend never happened, the NRA literally shifted overnight into America’s largest gun lobby in what is still quietly known within its lore as the “Cincinnati Revolt.” This internecine mutiny was over the NRA’s prior support for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which outlawed, among other things, mail-order rifles like the one tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, bought through an ad in the NRA’s own flagship magazine American Rifleman. “The NRA does not advocate an ‘ostrich’ attitude toward firearms legislation,” explained the NRA’s old guard before it was overthrown. The modern NRA has since embraced an “unyielding” and “absolutist” take on gun rights, and over the past 43 years it has helped expand access to guns across most of the nation.

The NRA’s Royal British roots hardly make for a good story for the modern NRA to tell. It has come up with a new origin story more than once, most recently as 2013, after the re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama. “We are the largest civil rights organization in the world, and we have been part of the fabric of America ever since 1871,” wrote LaPierre in February 2013 in an article that appeared in the American Rifleman. The idea of the NRA being the world’s largest civil rights organization planted a new notion that soon morphed into another. “As members of the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, NRA members know tyranny when we see it,” wrote LaPierre six months later on the conservative news website The Daily Caller.

Wayne LaPierre and NRA chief spokesman Andrew Arulanandam each declined to comment for this story.

Since then, the NRA has made this specious claim—that the NRA is the nation’s oldest (or longest-standing) civil rights organization—its new mantra, repeated by leaders, lawyers and the group’s website. Just last year the NRA laid down the keystone of its new genesis story by falsely claiming that the early NRA “stood with freed slaves” during Reconstruction. This is a canard that tries to turn the history of gun ownership in America from one dominated by white men armed to help maintain an unequal social order into a mythical one where white gun owners and the NRA itself were on the frontlines of America’s earliest struggles for racial equality. “Those Who Call The NRA Racist Don’t Know Our History,” wrote LaPierre in 2017. “In our [149-year] history, open doors for minorities, and defense of our common rights, has been at the center of the NRA’s existence.”

By then the NRA had already helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews, the idea being that Jews could have defended themselves from Nazi fascism if the Gestapo had not first seized their guns. Needless to say, this claim has no basis in any prior scholarship. “For whatever reason, historians have paid no attention to Nazi laws and policies restricting firearms ownership as essential elements in creating tyranny,” as one NRA-funded scholar himself lamented. This theory turns the worst atrocity of the modern era from one with many documented factors leading to the Nazis’ consolidation of power, into a myth where the Holocaust itself is the cautionary tale of gun control.

 

The NRA’s attempts to identify itself with the Black struggle for equal rights can be seen in the case of Roy Innis and the award named after him.

In 1968, around the time of the start of the gun rights rebellion within the NRA, Innis emerged as the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, running on an independent “Black Nationalist” agenda. His predecessors had helped establish the “Freedom Rides” and led them through the deep South in the early 1960s. By the early 1990s, after Innis had seen first one and then another of his sons “murdered,” in his words, “by young, Black thugs,” he joined the NRA’s board of directors, among the first African Americans to do so.

In 2017, after Roy Innis died, the NRA established a memorial award in his name. The first recipient was honored posthumously in 2019. Otis McDonald was an Army veteran and retired maintenance engineer from the South Side of Chicago. It was McDonald who brought the pivotal Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, decided in 2010, that extended the right to keep arms in one’s home throughout the nation.

This ceremony last spring was the high point of the NRA’s convention in Indianapolis—a weekend marred by breaking news of the embezzlement scandal. The commemoration was led by NRA board director Allen West, a former Army lieutenant colonel whose mock execution of an Iraqi policeman had led to him receiving a fine but keeping his rank. He also served in Congress as the first African American representative from Florida since Reconstruction. He rose in the Tea Party Caucus until, after redistricting, he lost his seat. West is now the chairman of the Texas Republican Party. He made the QAnon phrase, “We are the storm,” the new slogan of the Texas GOP, putting it on fundraising emails, social media, T-shirts, and hats.

The NRA had helped boost a novel theory about the Holocaust: that German gun control laws were “essential elements” leading to the genocide of six million Jews.

West joined fellow board members Oliver North and Ted Nugent in making accusations of financial improprieties against LaPierre, and it was West who called for him to resign. Yet West and LaPierre still managed to maintain a united front when it came to the ceremony for McDonald, which led to the NRA announcing that its founding fathers had armed freed slaves.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to Otis W. McDonald for his courage, his commitment and his sacrifice to take a stand and be steadfast in his belief in the United States Constitution,” West said from the stage, with LaPierre and his staff sharing the dais. Close to 1,000 NRA members, many wearing NRA gear or MAGA hats, were in the hall. West went on to fold McDonald’s action into the myth of the early NRA’s role during Reconstruction. “Know the history. The NRA, this organization, stood with freed slaves to make sure they had their Second Amendment rights,” he said. Everyone in the room rose and applauded, in the longest standing ovation of the meeting.

“As an American black man, the history of the National Rifle Association has a special meaning for me, and I often reflect on it,” West wrote in a 2018 column for the Conservative News Service. “At a time when recently freed slaves were transitioning to being American citizens, they came under assault during the Reconstruction Era. When faced with the threats, coercion, intimidation, and yes, violence of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, it was the NRA that stood with and defended the rights of blacks to the Second Amendment.”

Is there any actual historical link between the NRA and the Black struggle? In the six years after it was founded in 1871, the NRA kept busy. It took the organization two years, after lobbying for funding from Albany, to finally open its first range, known as Creedmoor, in what is now Queens in 1873. Over the next four years, NRA shooters honed their skills, defeating first the Irish and then the “Imperial Team” of their Royal role models, both times at Creedmoor, to become the undisputed rifle champions of the (English-speaking) world in 1877. It was an American triumph in the Victorian Era, and the early NRA’s greatest accomplishment. Yet, like most of the NRA’s actual history, this is something that the modern NRA would prefer to forget.

It is also true that co-founder William Conant Church and other early NRA leaders, all based in New York, supported President Ulysses S. Grant’s efforts during Reconstruction to crush the Ku Klux Klan, in order to put an end to ongoing Southern resistance. The filmmaker Michael Moore’s insinuation in his 2002 film Bowling for Columbine that the NRA and the KKK were somehow linked, because they were founded five years apart, is another canard, one flying in the other direction.

The use of Black Codes to outlaw gun ownership by freed slaves in the South was painfully real. But even this important issue was not raised by the early NRA or the men who founded it. Church, an unabashed Grant admirer, wrote one of the first books about the Civil War and its aftermath, titled Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction. In it, Church dealt explicitly with the challenges faced by freed slaves, including violence by Southern groups and authorities:

The negroes had ceased to be slaves, but they had not yet become free men, and there was no guaranty that they might not be subjected to some new form of oppression …[O]ne Southern State after another passed laws designed to perpetuate the scheme of enforced labour by establishing a system of apprenticeship, more heartless and cruel than slavery had ever been, and lacking the ameliorating features of the ‘patriarchal institution.’ . . . Negroes were killed in large numbers throughout the South without even an attempt to hold any one responsible for their murder.

Church made no mention whatsoever of any group, whether private or governmental, coming to the aid of freed slaves by helping to arm them. (Although he did mention the Union Army’s decision during the war to start “arming the negro” to add “a powerful ally” and “make good soldiers.”) Nor did he mention any need to arm freed slaves, or even any discussion about the matter. As a matter of fact, Church did not mention the National Rifle Association at all.

Eighty years after Reconstruction, however, at the start of the Civil Rights era, there was a case that involved the NRA and the KKK. A Black man named Robert Williams, who had served as a Marine in a segregated unit during World War II, became the president of the local NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. He helped integrate the town library, but trouble started when he and other activists tried to desegregate the town’s swimming pool after several Black children drowned in nearby swimming holes. The local KKK mobilized in response. “So we started arming ourselves,” said Williams. “I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land, and asked for a charter, which we got. In a year we had 60 members.” They called themselves Monroe’s Black Armed Guard.

In 1957 a group of hooded Klansmen fired shots at the home of a Black doctor who was another local NAACP leader. They were surprised when “Williams and the black men of Monroe fired back from behind sandbags and covered positions,” wrote Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham University law professor and the nation’s leading African American scholar on gun rights. The firefight was covered by newspapers as far away as Norfolk, Virginia, with the headlines “Citizens Fire Back at Klan” and “Shots Exchanged Near Residence of NAACP Head.” But the American Rifleman said nary a word, and the NRA did nothing subsequently to support its Black Monroe chapter, either.

The NRA did support at least one African American group in the South during the Civil Rights era. A half century ago it sold surplus government ammunition to the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The group “provided their own guns.” Yet today’s NRA falsely claims that “the NRA was their arsenal of democracy.”

 

The NRA’s use of the Holocaust myth began, as so many things do in the world of conservative politics, with a think tank.

Stephen P. Halbrook, a senior fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, has been described by the UCLA law professor Adam Winkler as “the nation’s leading expert on the right to keep and bear arms.” Halbrook filed an amicus brief in Heller vs. District of Columbia, the watershed Supreme Court case that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and president of the Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney—all without making any mention of having received nearly $300,000 in NRA funding. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller cited Halbrook’s brief twice. Halbrook was later one of the attorneys representing the NRA in the McDonald v. Chicago, which extended the Heller ruling throughout the nation.

In 2013, The Independent Institute published Halbrook’s book Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the States.’ “Based on newly discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries and newspapers of the time,” the book “presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power,” read the review of the book in the NRA’s American Rifleman. “While voluminous scholarship has documented the Third Reich and the Holocaust, this is the first thorough examination of the laws restricting firearm ownership that rendered Hitler’s political opponents, as well as the Jews, defenseless.”

The Washington Times, the conservative daily controlled by the Unification Movement (associated with the late Sung Myung Moon), also reviewed it, but notably hedged the book’s extravagant claim that gun suppression was pivotal in setting the Holocaust in motion.  “There is no way to prove it,” Robert VerBruggen wrote of the book’s thesis. But he did note that the book provides an “extensive history” of the matter.

Halbrook’s book glosses over evidence that prior scholars like Raul Hilberg have established that would seem to counter, if not disprove, his thesis. “Preventive attack, armed resistance, and revenge are almost completely absent in two thousand years of Jewish ghetto history. Instances of violent opposition, which may be found in one or another history book, are atypical and episodic,” Hilberg wrote in his 1961 book The Destruction of The European Jews. “The critical period of the 1930s and 1940s is marked by that same absence of physical opposition.”

The biggest hole in Halbrook’s research is one he admits himself, albeit in the pages near the back of his book. Halbrook notes that, “Police were required to list all weapons taken from Jews and to send the weapons seized and listing to the Gestapo.” Yet he has failed to locate any significant records of seizures of weapons from Jews, and no large caches of any weapons at all. As Halbrook writes:

Police reports listing weapons seized from Jews have been difficult to locate. Many such records may have been destroyed during the war, either by the Nazis themselves or due to Allied bombings. Routine police reports mention arms and seizures along with other incidents. For example, a report to the commander of the municipal police in Leipzig dated November 29, 1938, noted: “Based on the decree regarding the surrender of weapons in possession of Jews, three Jews surrendered their slashing and thrusting weapons and one Jew surrendered his hunting rifles. Two bayonets and a 85 mm grenade were reported found and surrendered.”

If this all seems rather cracked, which it is, consider that this issue came up in the last election cycle when Ben Carson, now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, suggested on CNN that gun control led to the Holocaust. His claim prompted a response from Alan E. Steinweis, a professor of history and Holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, that this argument “is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into a historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor.”

 

The “slippery slope” and its theoretical underpinnings are fueling today’s armed right. They disagree over matters from hate speech to the rules of engagement for use of force, with some openly advocating opening fire on BLM marchers. But what unites them is the shared notion that they are on the right side of history. The NRA-boosted myths about Reconstruction and the Holocaust reinforce their claim that it is not them, but gun control itself that is racist. “Thank God that the NRA was able to come to the black community’s defense” during Reconstruction, posted Old North State Patriots on Facebook in 2019. “There’s a reason that Hitler did it,” said former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka on Fox News the same year, referring to the Fuhrer’s alleged gun control to disarm the Jews. “This isn’t a theory–It’s history.”

The Oath Keepers/Patriot Movement in 2008 adopted the “Hitler took guns away” argument to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “Imagine that Herr Hitlery is sworn in as president in 2009. After a conveniently timed ‘domestic terrorism’ incident (just a coincidence, of course) … she promptly crams a United Nations mandated total ban on the private possession of firearms.” The idea has become a fixture on Fox News, with host Andrew Napolitano extending the example to include Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took up a similar line, telling Piers Morgan in 2013, “Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns, and I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!”

Many of today’s paramilitary groups keep a low profile. Instead of their own banner, many fly the Gadsden flag, a yellow militia banner of the Revolutionary War with a coiled green snake over the words “DONT TREAD ON ME.” Cadres greet each other online and in person through shared phrases, insignias, and other signs, creating a rich environment for racist extremists to operate. What else unites the armed right is their ongoing support for President Trump. He has called forth a movement bigger than himself, one that seems likely to outlast him.

America’s pro-Trump armed right would not be the first to invent a new ideology to justify  in advance their violence against others. Genocidaires developed propaganda ahead of the mass violence in late-1930s Germany and early-1990s Rwanda. The modern NRA’s whitewash of history today helps armed right-wing gangs from neo-Nazis to Three Percenters rationalize their intimidation and violence against others, including fellow Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech. Many of the same pro-Trump paramilitaries, who will be self-policing voters on election day, may grow more aggressive after the votes are tallied, especially if the top of their ticket comes up short.

It no longer matters to many of them, either, that the same NRA that helped inspire them is now nearing the previously unthinkable possibility of default. Unlike the NRA, which worked largely within the system, these armed gangs—with or without Trump—say they are ready to overthrow it.

Research for this article was supported by a Logan Nonfiction fellowship.

Frank Smyth is the author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History.

Five Years After Sandy Hook, Major U.S. Papers Still Have a Serious Gun Problem

http://progressive.org/dispatches/five-years-after-sandy-hook-newspapers-still-have-gun-problem-171221/

On December 21, 2012, the National Rifle Association called a rare press conference to respond to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which happened seven days earlier. The killing left twenty young children and six of their educators dead.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, who took no questions afterward. Critics at the time derided his remarks as “tone-deaf,” but five years on, the NRA has still managed to defeat every subsequent attempt at gun reform in Congress.

What is the secret of the NRA’s success? It may involve the NRA’s ability to speak to and write for media outlets without being questioned, like it did after the Sandy Hook tragedy. Key to this strategy is the use of alleged “independent” experts who spread its pro-gun views throughout the press.

Take, for example, the pro-gun scholar, David Kopel. Today the news and opinion sections at both The New York Times and The Washington Post are out of sync over whether to disclose his receipt of NRA funding, while The Wall Street Journal misleads readers by never disclosing it.

“Writers and editors make their own decisions, which I don’t second-guess,” said Kopel in an email to The Progressive.

“I think most credible news organizations are pretty good about disclosing relevant information about those who write guest columns or op-ed pieces, and it is always best to provide similar disclosures about experts quoted in news stories,” Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics at the University of Minnesota, said in an email.

“The news people should not obey different rules from the opinion people,” said Ed Wasserman, a journalism ethics expert and Dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, in a telephone interview.

Washington Post editors disagree.

“The news department was not involved in how the opinion section chose to identify Mr. Kopel,” the Post’s Communications Manager Molly Gannon Conway said in an email. She was referring to how the paper’s opinion section discloses Kopel’s NRA funding while the news section does not.

Gannon Conway defended the news editors’ decisions, writing, “At times, Kopel’s positions have not been in sync with the NRA, even though one organization he is affiliated with gets some NRA funding. We don’t see a reason at this time to single out the NRA in referring to Mr. Kopel, given his affiliation with multiple entities, with varied sources of funding.”

Key to the NRA’s strategy is the use of alleged “independent” experts who spread its pro-gun views throughout the press.

David Kopel’s pro-gun positions rarely, if ever, seem out of sync with the NRA. It’s true, he does wear several hats. Mr. Kopel is an associate policy analyst at the libertarian CATO Institute in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor teaching one elective course a year at the Denver University law school.

Kopel’s main job is research director and Second Amendment project director at the Denver-based Independence Institute. A self-described “action tank,” the institute has received more than $2 million from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund since 2004, according to its publicly available tax filings. David Kopel is mentioned by name. He earns $194,258 per year from the Independence Institute, and has also long been its highest paid employee.

“If he is financially dependent on the NRA, you do have to point out that there is a relationship,” said Dean Wasserman of Berkeley.


Last month the Times ran a news story about “Ghost Guns,” homemade firearms that are hard to track. The story quoted David Kopel, describing him as “the research director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank, who is also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver.”

In the story, Kopel compared the nation’s current level of gun regulation to “prohibition or quasi-prohibition,” adding that the nation’s allegedly restrictive gun laws are “the lever that pushes up homemade production.” That seems odd considering that gun laws have only grown more lax across the nation over the past twenty years. But, knowing that his Independence Institute has received NRA funding, his comments make a lot more sense.

The New York Times’s assistant managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, declined to comment.

Three years earlier, Times’s opinion editors ran an online column by Kopel where he complained about, “Bloomberg’s Gun Control That Goes Too Far for the Average Citizen.” Might readers have looked at it differently had they known that the author was the top-paid employee at an NRA-funded think tank? I brought the matter to Times’ online opinion editors, and as previously reported in The Progressive, they “updated” Kopel’s author identification and changed the wording to note that his Independence Institute “has received NRA funding.”

Back in 2013, the paper still had a public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who is now a media columnist at the Post. She commented back then about the lack of disclosure in Kopel’s Times opinion pieces.

“The more readers know about the background of an opinion writer, the better they are served. And that applies here,” Sullivan told me after I pointed out to her that the paper had failed to disclose Kopel’s NRA funding with his 2013 article, “The N.R.A. Is Still Vital, Because the 2nd Amendment Is.” That piece ran little more than two weeks after the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown.


The Washington Post’s news and opinion sections are similarly out of sync. Only four days after the Sandy Hook shooting, the Postquoted Kopel in a news story saying that the AR-15 rifle used by the shooter was “the best-selling rifle in the country,” and that it would meet a future Supreme Court standard for being in common use.

A central goal of the NRA has been to normalize the use of military-style, semi-automatic rifles, some of whose models were outlawed for 10 years due to a now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” Yet the Post identified Kopel only as an independent scholar without mentioning his NRA funding.

This year in October, in another news story that ran three days after America’s largest modern mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the Post similarly identified Kopel as “an adjunct professor at Denver University’s Sturm College of Law and an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute,” never mentioning either his main position as Research Director of the Independence Institute or its steady receipt over more than a decade of annual six-figure NRA foundation grants, according to the foundation’s tax filings.

The Post’s online opinion section has done better. The paper runs Kopel’s opinion columns as part of The Volokh Conspiracy, a consortium of conservative-leaning legal scholars hosted by the Postonline. But for years, the Post ran Kopel’s columns without identifying his NRA funding.

The Post finally began noting Kopel’s NRA financial ties after a critical post by the liberal group Media Matters. The paper’s opinion editors quietly changed his identification retroactively in all his columns. Editors call that a “rowback,” as if to row backwards over water and then forward again to smooth any ripple of an error. On this point Post spokeswoman Gannon Conway declined to comment.

Both the news and opinion sections of The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, have shared Kopel’s views with readers without ever disclosing his NRA funding. Journal editors declined to comment.

This incongruity among America’s top newspapers misleads readers. An easy online search of his name locates a “Supported Research” page (now outdated) on the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund website with Kopel’s name listed multiple times.

Frank Smyth has written on the gun movement for The Progressive, MSNBC, and The Washington Post. His Mother Jones story after Sandy Hook, “Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Delta Sigma Chi award for National Magazine Investigative Reporting.

The Times Has Finally (Quietly) Outed an NRA-Funded “Independent” Scholar

This article originally appeared in The Progressive on April 23, 2014 here.

by Frank Smyth

Last Friday The New York Times finally addressed a conflict of interest that it had been ignoring for years. Although, among the powerful institutions that have long done so, the Times is hardly alone. The matter helps illustrate how the gun lobby has managed to shape the nation’s gun debate without showing its hand. The news comes to light one day before the start of the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Indianapolis.

David Kopel is the Research Director and Second Amendment Project Director of the Colorado-based nonprofit Independence Institute, which describes itself as a “free-market think tank.” He is an Associate Policy Analyst at the Washington-based Cato Institute, and an adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at Denver University. Kopel is also the author of 15 books and 90 scholarly articles many having to do with the Second Amendment and gun policies.

Kopel is widely known as one of the nation’s leading legal scholars on gun issues, writing from a pro-gun rights perspective. He testified in the Senate last year as an apparent independent expert in the nationally televised hearings held in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. For even longer, he has regularly written opinion pieces for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal while being similarly identified as an independent scholar.

David Kopel has managed to establish himself as an independent authority on gun policy issues even though he and his Independence Institute have received over $1.42 million including about $175,000 a year over eight years from the NRA.

NRA officials at the nonprofit group’s Virginia headquarters declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kopel, for his part, has rarely disclosed his NRA funding. But when presented with evidence of it, he has not denied it, either.

“If that’s her editorial judgement, that’s fine with me,” he said in a brief telephone interview on Friday from his Colorado office at the “Independence Institute” about a New York Times editor’s decision to disclose his NRA funding in an opinion piece under his byline posted the day before. “I’m not going to second-guess an editor.”

For years, Kopel’s defense of the gun lobby has been unmistakable. “Today, with 4 million members, the N.R.A. is one of the largest civic organizations in the U.S., and by far the largest civil liberties organization on the planet,” he wrote in the Times “Room for Debate” section last year less than one month after the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting.

Kopel also often suggests, much like NRA leaders, that there is little possible compromise in the gun policy debate. “The only item on the agenda of today’s antigun advocates that realistically could have prevented a psychopath from stealing his mother’s legally registered guns would be banning and confiscating the more than 300 million firearms in the United States,” he added in his Times’ piece last year right after a disturbed young man in Newtown used his mother’s guns to murder first his mother and then 26 others including 20 first-grade children.

Last week, in the same Times forum, Kopel painted former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently pledged to devote $50 million to promote gun reform efforts, as an extremist. “[A]ccording to my analysis, the Bloomberg version of background checks felonizes the vast majority of American gun owners.” A link embedded into the words “my analysis” refers to an article last spring under his byline in the National Review that similarly fails to disclose Kopel’s NRA funding.

His arguments often set up straw men that he then knocks down. How many gun control advocates or groups, for instance, have ever suggested that Mexico’s failed gun policies could somehow be a model for us? Yet Kopel recently wrote online in The Washington Post, one of two major newspapers to run his gun policy opinions last week, a piece titled “Mexico’s gun control laws: A model for the United States?”

News broadcasters and a leading journalism institute have also treated Kopel as an independent expert. Both PBS and NPR have brought him into gun policy debates as an apparent independent voice. The nonprofit Poynter Institute has asked Kopel to help lead seminars for journalists on gun policy issues including last spring during the Congressional gun debate. (This coming Friday Kopel will help lead a Firearms Law Seminar at the NRA convention in Indianapolis.)

Newspapers like The Christian Science Monitor have cited Kopel as an independent expert in news reports. Although two newspaper reporters, Ed O’Keefe and Tom Hamburger, in the news section of the Washington Post did identify Kopel’s NRA funding at least once last spring, after I broke news of it on MSNBC.com, and after the NRA itself began distributing one of Kopel’s opinion pieces during the Congressional debate over gun control legislation.

LAST FRIDAY at 3:53 PM in New York editors at The New York Times “Room for Debate” online section changed Kopel’s author ID on his opinion piece almost 22 hours after it had been originally posted. The change informed readers that Kopel “has received grant money from the National Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund.” Kopel had been previously identified in this piece, like in his previous Times “Room for Debate” pieces, as an independent researcher, author and legal scholar.

Kopel received $1.39 million in grant money from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund between 2004 and 2011, according the Fox News affiliate television station in Denver, Fox31, in a May 2013 report by Eli Stokols. The report was about a lawsuit filed by Kopel and his Independence Institute on behalf of 55 of Colorado’s 62 elected sheriffs challenging Colorado gun control laws passed last year.

The same day that Kopel led a press conference with Colorado sheriffs to announce the law suit, Colorado resident Tom Mauser called the Independence Institute to ask the think-tank whether it has received money from the NRA. Mauser has been a well-known Colorado gun control advocate for years, ever since his 15-year-old son, Daniel, was one of 12 students murdered along with one teacher in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.

“I asked them if they got money from the NRA, and they wouldn’t tell me,” Mauser told Fox31 Denver. “They said, ‘look it up for yourself.’”

In February 2013, less than one month after Kopel testified in the Senate, I reported in MSNBC.com that two of the Senate’s recent witnesses, Kopel and David T. Hardy, another legal expert who similarly testified at the nationally televised Senate hearing as an independent witness, had received over $108,000 and $67,500, respectively, from the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund in 2011.

At the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont read Kopel’s biography including his affiliations with the Independence Institute, the Cato Institute and Denver University Strum College of Law. Chairman Leahy jokingly added, “Did I get that all correct?”, before giving Kopel the floor. No one, not any Senators, Kopel or the press made any mention of his NRA funding.

Kopel later conceded to me that he has received NRA funds, but maintained that he was not obligated to disclose them.

“I’ve never heard of [a] think tank or interest group employees naming donors during legislative testimony,” Kopel wrote to me in an email last year.

Kopel’s role at the Independence Institute is larger than it appears. Dozens of staff members and experts including the institute’s President Jon Caldara are listed on the institute’s website. But the highest paid employee is not the organization’s president but Kopel who earned $187,666 including bonuses, a total of $67,000 more than Caldara in 2011, according to the group’s latest financial records available.

The same year, Kopel received not only one $108,000 grant from the gun lobby, but part of another grant from the NRA’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, this one for a $55,000 grant to him and two other Independence Institute scholars.  The NRA fund has continued supporting the Independence Institute, giving the group $317,500 in 2012, according to the NRA fund’s latest records on file.

Kopel has bona fide Ivy League credentials. He graduated with honors from Brown University and earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He has written for scholarly journals at Yale, New York University, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania.

Kopel is a regular contributor, too, to “The Volokh Conspiracy,” an influential and self-described “libertarian, conservative, centrist” legal blog that since January has been hosted by The Washington Post. Kopel wrote another piece there on Monday arguing that both the First and Second Amendments “safeguard natural, pre-existing human rights.”

At the same time, Kopel’s gun lobby funding is now no longer in doubt. The question is how should those who give him a platform to air his gun rights views like Congress and the Times identify him to the public?

“The more readers know about the background of an opinion writer, the better they are served. And that applies here,” The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan told me last year in an email after I first broke news of Kopel’s NRA funding.

Last Friday, I forwarded her email to editors at the Times “Room for Debate” section, after they ran another one of Kopel’s pieces without disclosing his NRA funding. Editors made the change to identify Kopel’s receipt of NRA grant money little over an hour later, after first calling Kopel to confirm his receipt of NRA funds.

Kopel’s piece last Friday in the Times was part of an online series by six different authors about the nation’s gun policies pegged to both Bloomberg’s funding announcement and this weekend’s NRA convention. The series was titled, “Toe to Toe with the NRA.”


Frank Smyth is an independent, award-winning investigative reporter who has covered the gun lobby for The Progressive and MSNBC. His Mother Jones story last year, “Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle,” won the Society of Professional Journalists Delta Sigma Chi award for National Magazine Investigative Reporting. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com. Follow him on Twitter @SmythFrank.

– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187663/times-has-finally-quietly-outed-nra-funded-{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9Cindependent{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}E2{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af}9D-scholar#sthash.OYfZhMvM.dpuf

Do news blackouts help journalists held captive?

Read the original article at CPJ’s Journalist Security Blog here.

Do news blackouts help journalists held captive?

At any given time over the past two years, as wars raged in Libya and then Syria, and as other conflicts ground on in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, a number of journalists have been held captive by a diverse array of forces, from militants and rebels to criminals and paramilitaries. And at any given time, a small handful of these cases–sometimes one or two, sometimes more–have been purposely kept out of the news media. That is true today.

News organizations have invoked the captives’ safety in seeking media blackouts. But do the blackouts really benefit the individuals being held captive?

Different actors hold journalists for various reasons. Ransom can be one, as captors have demanded cash for journalists in Colombia, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Politics can be another, as captors have used journalists like the late Daniel Pearl in Pakistan to communicate a political message. Influencing coverage can be another motive. This month, five employeesincluding three non-journalists of El Siglo de Torreón in northern Mexico were held for over 10 hours before being released.

Extracting information can be another motivation. Last June Mining News editor Franck Fwamba was abducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and interrogated for 11 hours about his finances, sources and relationships. Concerns over espionage can be yet another motive. In 1991, a French photojournalist and I were held by Iraqi government forces who, for a time, accused us of being spies.

The key tests are whether press coverage will work for or against the captive individuals (whether they are news personnel or not) and how the captives’ interests are balanced against the public’s right to information.

“This is not a uniform thing. Each case is different,” said David Rohde, a Thomson Reuters foreign affairs columnist and a former New York Times correspondent who was held hostage for seven months in Afghanistan.

It’s a divisive issue among the press corps, whether to honor a request not to report about a journalist in captivity. In December, Turkish news outlets and the U.S.-based website Gawker, whose slogan is “today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,” broke a blackout sought by NBC News on the kidnapping in Syria of correspondent Richard Engel and his crew.

The effect of breaking that blackout is largely unknown; the NBC crew was freed within hours of the first public reports. But John Cook’s report in Gawker, in particular, provoked outrage from journalists and human rights defenders who often work alongside each other in conflict areas. Human Rights Watch’s Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert encouraged members of a closed, war correspondents’ group on Facebook to bombard Gawker with emails demanding the website remove the story.

“Yo @johnjcook, ever put yr life on line in hostile country to report story 4 Gawker? Don’t 2nd guess @NBCNews if you havent,” tweeted Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor and CPJ board member.

Cook said he spoke with NBC but decided not to go along with the network’s request. “No one at NBC made a case to me that reporting Engel’s situation might cause anything concrete to happen to him, because they didn’t know anything about his current circumstances,” he wrote. “And as a more general question, it’s not clear how publicity as a rule increases risk to kidnapping victims.”

Research by the Committee to Protect Journalists does offer some insight. Engel later said that his captors seemed most interested in getting a ransom. The captors, Syrian militiamen, executed the news crew’s Syrian rebel escort but acted to keep the Western journalists alive. “I didn’t think they were going to execute us at first,” Engel said in an on-camera interview after their release. “They clearly wanted us as hostages. This was a hostage-taking scenario.”

Many observers maintain that publicity in ransom cases complicates efforts to secure the captive’s safe return. “Negotiations with kidnappers could be more difficult if they become aware that they’re holding a ‘big fish,'” noted the Canadian Association of Journalists after the CBC requested a media blackout in 2008 during correspondent Mellissa Fung’s four-week kidnapping in Afghanistan.

“My kidnappers had a delusional idea about the kind of ransom they could get for me,” Rohde told CPJ, saying that press would have only worsened his and a colleague’s chances of survival. The New York Times requested a blackout after an initial report by Al Jazeera about his abduction, and all but a few isolated news outlets honored it. As his ordeal dragged on, Rohde and a colleague eventually managed to escape.

Robert Young Pelton, an author, journalist, and publisher of the Somalia Report, is skeptical of news organizations’ motives behind blackouts. “In many cases, these blackouts are just a bald-faced attempt to buy time, mitigate bad publicity, reduce financial impact, and hide corporations’ incompetence in their ability to get their employees back,” he wrote in a piece for Gawker on the NBC case.

The blackout in Rohde’s case went as far as to include sites such as Wikipedia, which erased user-editor posts about his kidnapping a dozen times before finally freezing the page. New York Times journalists also altered Rohde’s bios on the Times‘ website and, using a pseudonym, also on Wikipedia, as the paper later disclosed in a story once Rohde was free. Colleagues removed the name of his prior employer as it included the word “Christian” along with Rohde’s investigations of groups like Al-Qaeda, while emphasizing his investigation of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims.

Some were disquieted by such widespread manipulation. Poynter Institute ethicist Kelly McBride said she was “really astounded” by the media blackout. “I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public,” McBride told NPR.

Journalists do have a duty to report the news. It was one thing to withhold information about the kidnapping of Rohde, who is very prominent in the field but is not a household name. But would it have been practical or ethical for dozens of news organizations to withhold information for many months about Engel, whose face is seen in millions of homes on a regular basis?

History and context provide some guidelines. Withholding information so as not to endanger individuals, including U.S. soldiers, has been an accepted journalistic practice over time. In 1994, all four major American network television news divisions voluntarily withheld information that U.S. war planes had lifted off from Fort Bragg, N.C., to support a planned invasion of Haiti, only to report the news after the invasion was cancelled.

But some critics complain that news organizations don’t apply media blackouts to non-journalists. “Stopping the flow of information about a kidnapped foreign correspondent suggests that media outlets value the lives of their own personnel above those of other people they report on,” wrote Blake Lambert, a Canadian freelance journalist for the Christian Science Monitor and other news outlets, on the website of the London-based International News Safety Institute after Fung’s Afghan ordeal.

For news outlets to give fellow journalists special treatment would seem indefensible. But it’s not clear-cut that is happening. More than 1,000 people, virtually all non-journalists, have been held hostage in Somalia every year, for example, according to news reports. Only a handful of them receive press attention.

Some news organizations have maintained that journalists held hostage receive no special treatment. Back in 1994, at least 15 news organizations honored an AP request not to report the kidnapping of its correspondent, Tina Susman, who was released after 20 days of captivity in Mogadishu. “We would withhold news of a kidnapping of anyone if we felt that it was not already in the public domain, and if we felt that coverage would further imperil the person’s life or the prospect of an early release,” AP’s then-International Editor Tom Kent explained toAmerican Journalism Review after the ordeal.

Another matter concerns freelance journalists. Several analysts point out that the abductions of freelance journalists are not subjected to the same level of pre-publication scrutiny as those of staff journalists who are kidnapped. Some cases of freelancers are publicized even when they appear similar to those involving staff journalists that are kept quiet. Other cases of freelancers receive little press attention even when coverage of their status would help them.

I know from my own experience how corporate interests can work against journalists held captive. In 1991, during the post-Gulf War uprisings against Saddam Hussein, colleagues and I crossed into Iraq with anti-Saddam rebels. A European colleague, Gad Gross, was executedalong with our armed rebel escort. A French colleague, Alain Buu, and I were captured an hour later and held captive for 18 days. We were missing as far as our editors and family members knew.

A longtime, accredited CBS News radio stringer, I was also carrying network video equipment that CBS television producers asked me to bring in once the radio desk told them that I was going into Iraq. Once my colleague and I went missing, my family still had to push the network to report the case. A debate ensued at the network, with CBS lawyers arguing that giving our story press could be perceived as implying network liability, CBS colleagues later told me. Having CBS News step up to confirm that I was a journalist was key, as Iraqi authorities were accusing me of being an intelligence agent. In any such case, press coverage can help by convincing suspicious captors that the captives are independent journalists, and by underscoring that any actions to harm them would also not go unnoticed. Conversely, sometimes keeping the kidnapping of a journalist -whether a freelancer or not– out of the press can help persuade captors to release the captive and still save face.

There is no single template showing how to handle such cases, as each deserves its own careful examination. But a few guidelines come to mind:

 

  • Each case is unique, but standards should be consistent. News organizations need to apply the same test of balancing the captive’s interest against the public’s right to know. That is true whether the captive is a journalist or not. And the scale can tip the more any hostage is well-known, whether he or she is a journalist or not.
  • Evidence suggests that publicity can fuel ransom demands for anyone held hostage, although more research needs to be done. Publicity can put captives in danger if it leads to higher ransoms that family members or news organizations are unable to meet.
  • The motive of captors must be scrutinized in each case to determine whether their goal is ransom, political gain, media influence, or something else. This may be difficult to determine. But it should nonetheless help guide any decision weighing whether press would be more likely to help or hinder the captive’s well-being.
  • The decision over whether or not press is desirable should be made by a coalition of stakeholders led by family members, who should independently evaluate the recommendations of news directors and security advisers. (This is especially important in the case of freelancers.) And they should remain open to changing their decisions as a situation develops.
  • Keeping a case out of the public eye is increasingly difficult today due to the Internet; the challenge increases if the captive is a well-known public figure. News organizations may be able to persuade other major outlets to keep a case quiet, but they face extraordinary challenges in scrubbing information posted across the Web. It may be more practical to release limited information about an abduction early, then manage the flow closely.
  • If publicity is desired, close management of information is essential. Colleagues and family members may decide it best to release some information, but still try to keep the case relatively quiet. Advocates may also decide to shape the narrative of a journalist held captive–highlighting one nationality over another, for example, in the case of a person with dual citizenship. Or by highlighting stories captors might see favorably. Or by downplaying information about matters like financial holdings.
  • Journalists do deserve special treatment in one respect. In the case of media blackout or manipulation of information, the public trust must be maintained and readers or the broadcast audience should be informed afterward what was done and why, and the record should be set straight.
  • Do no harm should guide decisions. Claiming that there is no evidence that harm would be done by publicizing a case is not an argument in favor of publicity. Instead, every news outlet should consider whether press is likely to help or hinder the interests of not the news organization or any other entity, but the individual –whether they are news personnel or not–at risk in captivity.

 

The matter is hardly an academic one for journalists and others either known to be in captivity or still missing today. Freelance journalist James Foley, a contributor to Global Post, was kidnapped in northwest Syria late last year; his family waited six weeks before deciding to make the case public. He remains missing. Austin Tice, a freelance journalist for McClatchy newspapers and The Washington Post, was seized in Damascus in August, and what appears to be a staged video of him in captivity leads observers to suggest that Syrian government forces may be holding him. His parents recently traveled to Beirut to try and appeal to whoever may be holding him.

Neither is the risk limited to Western correspondents. Mohamed al-Saeed of Syrian State TV was kidnapped last August in Damascus and he, like many others, remains missing. Bashar Fahmi of the U.S.-government broadcaster Al-Hurra and his Turkish cameraman disappeared in Syria reporting in Aleppo. The Turkish cameraman was captured and released almost 90 days later. But Fahmi is still missing, and his fate remains unknown.

The over-riding guideline: Every captive situation requires the same degree of care and balance of interests as any story where lives are in peril, whether the captives are journalists or not.

Frank Smyth is CPJ’s senior adviser for journalist security. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, Rwanda, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Jordan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @JournoSecurity.

U.S. Sends Wrong Message to the World

Original article can be found here.

Restrictive regimes around the world came out ahead when the U.S. Supreme Court announced this week that it would not hear an appeal by two journalists in a case involving the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, face up to 18 months in jail for not revealing their confidential sources.

President George W. Bush has stressed the need for greater press freedom in Russia, the Middle East and Asia, but the message from U.S. prosecutors and courts is being heard more clearly in repressive corners of the world. Many of the world’s despots have been using the case to their advantage.

Late last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists protested Cameroon’s imprisonment of Eric Wirkwa Tayu, publisher of a small private newspaper, Nso Voice, on charges that he defamed a local mayor. The government justified the detention in part by saying: “You are aware courts have decided in a number of countries that protection of free speech does not grant journalists, for instance, the privilege to refuse to divulge names of sources in all circumstances.”

Similarly, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela recently complained when international observers criticized his country’s new media law, which severely restricts broadcast news coverage. They should complain instead, Chávez said, about “U.S. journalists that are being prosecuted by the government in Washington for not revealing their sources.”

The U.S. case has followed a winding path. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing two unnamed “senior administration officials,” first revealed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity in July 2003. Cooper wrote about the disclosure later; Miller conducted interviews but never wrote a story. A special prosecutor was appointed to determine whether government officials committed a crime by willfully disclosing the agent’s identity. No government official has been charged after two years of investigation, most of which has focused on compelling reporters to identify confidential sources. By refusing to hear the journalists’ appeal, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s contempt ruling against Miller and Cooper.

In repressive countries, journalists are routinely compelled to reveal their sources. Last week alone, CPJ found that three governments on three continents had harassed or jailed journalists while pressuring them to reveal sources.

In Nepal, the police demanded that Kishor Karki, editor of the daily Blast Time, reveal his sources for a report on clashes between the government and Maoist rebels. In a separate incident, two military officers insisted that the editor of Jana Aastha, Kishor Shrestha, and other journalists from the weekly reveal sources for an article about an army general. These journalists refused to reveal their sources, but officers promised they’d be back. In Nepal that threat is not empty.

In Serbia and Montenegro, two police officers visited the independent daily Danas, demanding that the editor, Grujica Spasovic, and director, Radivoj Cveticanin, reveal their sources for a report identifying where indicted war criminal Ratko Maldic may be hiding.

And in Burundi, authorities released journalist Etienne Ndikuriyo after jailing him for more than a week for a story questioning President Domitien Ndayizeye’s health. He said that prison interrogators demanded that he reveal his sources, but that he refused. Ndikuriyo faces criminal charges of “violating the honor” of the president.

The American case is troubling because it follows several others in which U.S. prosecutors and judges demanded that journalists disclose sources. A television reporter served four months of home confinement for refusing to reveal a source; prosecutors are seeking records from two New York Times reporters; several other reporters face contempt charges in a lawsuit involving a former U.S. government scientist.

Because the United States has set a high standard for press freedom, any perceived weakening in U.S. protections provides cover for authoritarian regimes to justify crackdowns. CPJ documented a spike in the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when restrictive governments appropriated the Bush’s war rhetoric to clamp down on dissent.

They may have a similar opportunity today.

(Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and journalist security coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.)