For members of the media elite and high-level politicians in Washington, the annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner is an opportunity to chat and show mutual solidarity. They usually present themselves as defenders of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, even though government after government has systematically trampled on them in the interests of American imperialism.
Illegal government surveillance, police violence, and violations of democratic tenets such as the separation of church and state are commonplace in America, and the mainstream media generally ignores them as long as their own financial interests are not endangered.
But this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner last Saturday night was marked by more than the usual level of hypocrisy. President Joe Biden and the assembled members of the political and media elite professed to defend press freedom – but only when it serves the foreign policy interests of American imperialism.
Apart from Donald Trump, all incumbent presidents have attended the dinner in recent years. Most of the President’s appearances were characterized by prepared speeches in which they made fun of the audience, the President’s political opponents and critics, and the President himself.
But Biden devoted most of his speech to a lengthy statement condemning the crackdown on journalists in Russia, China, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. He also promised that the United States would work diplomatically to secure the release of the Wall-Street-Journal– Reporter Evan Gershkovich and other American prisoners of the Putin regime. Gershkovich was recently arrested in Russia on fabricated espionage charges.
It was obvious that the countries he accused of press freedom violations are the same countries where US imperialism seeks to weaken and overthrow the government. For example, Biden mentioned the assassination of Washington-Postcommentator Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, said nothing.
Khashoggi, a former advisor to the Saudi monarchy turned critic, was targeted by the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. His security chief dispatched the hit squad and directed their action. During the 2020 election campaign, Biden claimed he would make the Saudi ruler a “pariah”. Instead, he humbly went to Riyadh to talk to the prince and assassin about increasing Saudi oil production.
But the most blatant case of double standards involved the Biden administration directly: the prosecution of Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder and editor was stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for almost a decade, where he had sought political asylum against US efforts to arrest and extradite him to the US. There he was to be charged with espionage for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay torture prison.
Four years ago, British police stormed the embassy and arrested Assange. Since then he has been in solitary confinement in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, which is actually intended for terrorists and violent criminals, and is awaiting extradition to the USA, where he faces 175 years in prison if convicted under the Espionage Act. He would be the first journalist to be prosecuted under this law, passed a century ago amid the anti-Communist hysteria surrounding America’s entry into World War I.
Three minutes into his speech at Saturday’s celebration, Biden declared, “Journalism is not a crime.” This statement came across as a perverse repetition of the statement made by half a dozen major international newspapers, including the New York Times, last December calling on the Biden administration to drop the charges against Assange because “publication is not a crime.”
It is noteworthy that neither the Times nor the Washington Post or any other bourgeois media, mentioned Assange in their coverage of the dinner, or addressed the contradiction between Biden’s commitment to the First Amendment and his administration’s ongoing efforts to extradite and imprison Assange. Nor did the correspondents or the media executives who made up the bulk of the dinner guests attempt to broach the subject.
Seven Democratic members of Congress, including all five members of the Democratic Socialists of America, recently issued an open letter calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to end the persecution of Assange. But none of the five MPs mentioned the issue at the dinner, which took place just four days before the World Press Freedom Day proclaimed by the United Nations.
During the course of his speech, Biden cajoled the press: “You enable ordinary citizens to question authority.” In fact, the American mainstream media has abandoned even the semblance of such an oppositional stance towards the US government.
Die Times, which sets the standard for daily reporting in the American media, is little more than an appendage of the CIA and the Pentagon on issues of national security, particularly the war in Ukraine. When 21-year-old National Guard pilot and IT specialist Jack Teixeira posted top-secret Pentagon documents on the internet, the Times tracked him down and published his name. He was arrested by the FBI just hours later.
Biden’s paean to the American media and commitment to the First Amendment was followed by a series of obvious and banal jokes, largely at the expense of Fox News, and some references to his old age as if it were the only obstacle to his re-election.
He also did not mention the war in Ukraine, which could escalate any day into a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, nor the corona pandemic, which continues to pose a deadly threat to the world population.
Notably, dinner attendees did not wear masks, as is customary at other major public events in Washington and across the country. Nothing has been done to protect anyone, including 80-year-old Biden, from the threat of a potentially fatal infection.
2023-05-01 22:50:14
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