Part Three: Fear of the Media
The entire episode of my brother’s travel visa to China being delayed and limited due to him being a member of the media was the first lesson we learned about the fear that authoritarian governments have about not only the free press, but about freedom in general. Perhaps this should not have been a surprise considering we were dealing with communist China. I mean we could never imagine our own government being this paranoid about what journalists might report on, right?
At about the same time as my brother was getting his visa approved, journalists who worked for his own company, the Associated Press, were in fact being spied on by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2012, the DOJ had secretly obtained two months of phone records by individual AP reporters and this information was publicized in May 2013. Outraged, the President & CEO of the AP wrote an open letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, stating that “there can be no possible justification for such an overboard collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters.”
The month of May was a trying time for my brother to get a visa to travel to China, but it was also a trying time for the U.S. government. During the same couple of weeks, the American public learned of the federal government’s attempt to spy on journalists from many news agencies (the AP, Fox News, ABC News, NBC News, and others). We also learned of the IRS scandal to deny and delay applications of tea party and other conservative groups during the pivotal 2012 election year.
And then we learned that the federal government might be spying on citizens through the National Security Administration (NSA) programs. This was made known in more detail by “whistleblower” Edward Snowden, who has been called everything from a hero to a traitor for exposing what he says was an overreach of the NSA’s collection of data on American citizens. (Ironically, while we were in China, Snowden was hiding out in Hong Kong, a city we never visited).
Regardless of our views on whether Snowden acted appropriately or illegally, one thing is clear: there is a growing concern about our personal privacy and individual liberties right here in America. But, at least when it happens here, we can still write about it and expose it without any real repercussions to our personal safety (for now, anyway). This is not the case in many countries, including China.