Time was when newspapers were as stalwart in defending the First Amendment rights of others as they were for themselves.  But increasingly, some media organizations are using their constitutionally protected platforms to intimidate others into surrendering their rights.

Specifically, we’re talking about the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” which is part of the First Amendment, along with freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly.  In contemporary parlance, redress of grievances translates into lobbying, which has become something of a dirty word.  In practice, it covers everything from writing your congressman on an issue or seeking a service academy appointment for your kid, to organized meetings between government officials and industry representatives.

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Most news organizations understand and respect this precept, and it’s reflected in their coverage of events that involve the matter.  This February 25 article from the financial news organization Marketwatch illustrates how reporting of this nature should be handled – flatly and factually:

Regulatory observers argued that the meeting was significant for Geithner because it was an opportunity for the Treasury Department to induce trade groups to come on board with aspects of the bank-reform legislation the agency supports. 

The article not only treats the subject in a mature and straightforward manner, it acknowledges the benefits of redress of grievances as “an opportunity” for government and business interests to have an open exchange on issues of importance.

But political polarization can and does impact how this constitutional right is handled by the media.  In a March 5 McClatchy report carried in the Columbus Dispatch, the author tries to suggest that something is amiss with plans to lobby Congress on health care reform legislation.

As President Barack Obama began pushing for a prompt vote on his health initiative, lobbyists and activist groups launched high-dollar advertising and grass-roots pressure campaigns on the roughly two dozen members of Congress who might be the final swing votes on the controversial issue.

Here we see an effort to impugn the constitutionally protected activity of seeking redress of grievances.  The mention of “high-dollar advertising” is meant to suggest that there’s something wrong with doing so even though the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right to engage in such activity.  Similarly, the use of the term “grass roots pressure campaigns” is designed to elicit a negative response to what amounts to individual people contacting their elected representatives.

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This particular article focuses on what right-of-center groups are planning for the health care debate and it will be interesting to see whether supporters of the president’s health care agenda will also be covered in terms of mounting a “grass roots pressure campaign,” geared toward swing votes in Congress.

Perhaps the most egregious example of abuse comes in the February 14 edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which published this news article designed to put a chill on businesses exercising their rights regarding the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), a common chemical ingredient in plastic for the last half-century, but which has recently come under fire.

Eight days after chemical industry lobbyists met with Obama administration officials, federal regulators delayed action on including bisphenol A in a new effort to better regulate dangerous chemicals.  The move is drawing suspicion, considering how the head of the Environmental Protection Agency had been talking tough in one speech after another last fall about the need to protect the public from such chemicals, particularly BPA.

This is an example of the wheels coming right off the wagon.  Not only does the “suspicion” cited in the news story come from a single person at a single organization it casts a pall of suspicion over a federal agency head and excludes key facts.  Absent from the report is the fact that additional studies of BPA were announced the month after EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s comments and the fact that EPA researchers concluded after Jackson’s speech that BPA is not harmful to humans.  The newspaper then followed up with an editorial two days later, again implying that a delay in policy making was somehow a nefarious act:

The failure to target BPA raises suspicion that the meeting between industry representatives and employees of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs influenced the EPA’s decision.

This may be an extreme case in point – Big Journalism has previously examined the journalistic shortcomings of this newspaper on this subject.  But it’s a clear example of how one newspaper can seek to intimidate an entire industry from exercising its First Amendment rights.  It’s also illustrative of what we see as an unfortunate trend.

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As competition in the media increases and as newsroom budgets shrink, reporters will be fighting to keep their jobs, hopefully by giving readers the best written news possible. What scares us is that sensationalism and negligence will drive this process, rather than the precepts of good journalism. It would be tragic if more newspapers treated our constitutional rights in the manner of the Journal Sentinel rather than in a more responsible manner.