There’s nothing the media love more than a story about themselves. And if it isn’t about them, they’ll make it so.
A particularly shameless example of this never-ending navel-gazing was a briefing the State Department held last week upon the release of its 2017 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The latest edition of this document, issued annually by congressional mandate since 1977, describes the condition of freedom in almost 200 countries and territories. Its publication is an important event, and not just because it highlights, in sometimes excruciating detail, abuses that many regimes around the world would prefer be kept quiet. These reports are some of the most-read on any U.S. government website and, as the department explains, “are used by a variety of actors, including the U.S. Congress, the Executive branch, and the Judicial branch as a factual resource for decision making in matters ranging from assistance to asylum.”
But most members of the media who questioned Michael Kozak, a senior official in the State Department’s bureau of democracy, human rights, and labor, weren’t interested in hearing about the horrors faced by men, women, and children raped, tortured, and murdered by governments around the world. Neither were they curious about what effect the reports might have on those governments or on the policymakers and diplomats in our own. No, they wanted to talk about themselves.
The first question came from the Associated Press’s Matt Lee, whose reporting is distributed to outlets across the country and beyond. “I realize that this report doesn’t cover the United States,” he said as he began his query—which focused almost entirely on the United States. “I’m just wondering how effective you think that you can be in leading by example when you accuse numerous countries of, say, assaults on press freedom when here in this country we have a president who routinely excoriates the press, calling individual media outlets—and individual reporters sometimes—fake news,” he asked. “How do you not open yourself up to charges of hypocrisy?”
Kozak gave a clear answer, free of bureaucratese: “[T]he countries that we criticize for limiting press freedom, it’s for things like having criminal libel laws where you can be put in jail for what you say. It’s for things like yanking the licenses of media outlets you don’t like or, in many cases, killing the journalists,” he said. “So I think we make quite a distinction between political leaders being able to speak out and say that that story was not accurate or using even stronger words sometimes, and using state power to prevent the journalists from continuing to do their work.”
That wasn’t enough for the reporters in the room. They remained indignant. Perhaps they were still stinging from President Donald Trump’s latest attack on the practitioners of their profession, with their tears of rage blinding them to the obvious difference between being mocked in a tweet and being disappeared—permanently.
The second question wasn’t any different from the first. “I’d like to know if you think that such statements in the United States weaken the impact of this report, because the American president has called the press an enemy of the people. And I think at one point he called for a closer look at libel laws or something like that,” a CNN reporter said. “Do you think in the eyes of people that are looking at this report, as an example and as a resource, do statements like that currently weaken its impact?”
Kozak, who has served as an ambassador to Belarus and chief of mission in Cuba, where diplomats were sickened by sonic attacks, used his own experiences in reply. “I don’t think we’d have a hard time explaining that in a lot of places. When you talk to some of my friends in Cuba, for example, who try to be independent journalists there and are routinely slapped around—they also get called names. But I think if it were limited to that, they’d be pretty happy as compared to the situation now.”
There were a few reporters in the room—mostly from foreign outlets—who asked questions about the subject at hand. But most did not. Perhaps members of the American media don’t know how different life can be for those—the vast majority of the world’s population—not fortunate enough to live in a country like the United States. Such provincialism is the only reasonable explanation for another part of the AP reporter’s question: “I’m wondering how you can criticize countries for discrimination against LGBT people when this administration’s stated policy is to exclude transgender people from serving in the military.” It’s astonishing for a reporter to wonder how the State Department can rebuke nations that make same-sex relations illegal or worse. It’s a capital offense in some countries. Can he really be unaware of the number of people murdered each year for their sexual orientation by the actions—or with the approval—of their own governments?
Reporters can’t claim total ignorance, however. In his remarks that began the briefing, acting secretary of state John Sullivan spoke, with some specificity, about the country reports. “Creating them is an enormous undertaking and not for the fainthearted,” he noted. Sullivan mentioned the “forced labor” and “child labor” Kim Jong-un’s regime uses in North Korea. He cited “the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Burma” and “widespread reports of rape and abuse by Syrian government personnel.” He also gave plenty of examples of places in which the press and protesters face far worse threats than a Twitter tantrum. “The Russian government continues to quash dissent and civil society” and “China continues to spread the worst features of its authoritarian system, including restrictions on activists, civil society, freedom of expression, and the use of arbitrary surveillance.” Turkey has seen “the detention of tens of thousands of individuals, including journalists and academics.” And the “right of peaceful assembly and freedoms of association and expression” in Iran “are under attack almost daily.”
Asking the sort of questions reporters put to Sullivan’s colleague afterward will get you imprisoned or murdered in many countries. But self-absorbed American journalists are remarkably selective in their combativeness. I couldn’t find a single one, for example, who’d had the gumption to ask Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif about his regime’s harsh treatment of protesters during the many interviews he granted while in New York last week. Since late December, the Iranian government has arrested 8,000 and murdered 50 protesters. Reporters, though, were more interested in his view on the other thing that obsesses them, besides themselves. A not atypical question: “Do you see President Trump as a crafty adversary, a bumbling fool, or someone who is simply ignorant of international relations?”
