Hey, Media: US Jails Journos, Too

The American media are celebrating Iran’s release of journalist Roxana Saberi in a case the press doggedly pursued. But today’s back-patting is hypocritical, writes Glenn Greenwald in Salon: the US media have all but ignored foreign journalists imprisoned by our own government, often with little reason. Case in point: the US held an al-Jazeera cameraman for 6 years without a trial. Where was the media on that one?

We held an AP photographer for two years without a trial in Iraq—“not an isolated incident,” noted the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Dozens of journalists—mostly Iraqis—have been detained by US troops” over a three-year period, the CPJ said. And we’re still holding a freelance photographer for Reuters. “The first duty of the American media,” Greenwald writes, “is to oppose oppressive behavior by our own government,” before “smugly” criticizing other countries.
(More American media stories.)