At a White House press conference last week, President Bush appeared with relatives of jailed Cuban dissidents at the State Department. In his address, Bush greeted Olga Alonso, whose brother Ricardo Gonzalez Alonso was sentenced to 20 years in prison for writing critical articles about the government in the Cuba Free Press.
"The authorities seized 'illegal contraband' they found in his home," Bush told the crowd of Cuban-Americans. "These included such things as a laptop computer, notebooks and a printer."
Bush could have found a similar story closer to home. In Orlando and Phoenix, staffers at two newsweeklies found themselves facing arrests and subpoenas. Both weeklies had published articles strongly critical of local police.
On Oct. 18, Phoenix New Times media executives Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were arrested in their homes after the two men published information from a grand jury investigation targeting their paper. The investigation was instituted in 2004 following an article in New Times about the allegedly hidden real-estate investments of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In Florida, on Oct. 19, three staffers from the Orlando Weekly were arrested on charges they had promoted prostitution by selling classified advertising for escort services. The arresting agency was the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation — a police task force that had been the subject of several Orlando Weekly articles criticizing agents' botched investigations of adult businesses.
Both cases "smack of retaliation," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
The Phoenix New Times — part of Village Voice Media, the largest publisher of alternative weeklies in the country — and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio know each other well. For the last 14 years, New Times writers have written over 60 articles on the self-proclaimed "Toughest Sheriff in America" detailing the squalid conditions of his jails, inmate deaths under his watch and his underhanded political maneuvering against rivals.
In return, Arpaio has barred New Times reporters from press conferences and refused public records requests. The animosity came to a head in 2004, after reporter John Dougherty, writing about the sheriff's $1 million-plus in commercial investment properties, published Arpaio's home address.
Arizona state law forbids publishing a police officer's address online (though not in print). However, Dougherty obtained the address from the county recorder's office.
Online.
At the request of Arpaio, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office hired special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik to investigate New Times. Through a grand jury, Wilenchik attempted to subpoena all notes, tapes and records of any New Times writers who have reported on Arpaio since 2004. In addition, Wilenchik requested the IP addresses, browsing habits and buying patterns of every New Times online reader during the same three-year period.
After the special prosecutor attempted to meet with the presiding judge in private, New Times media executives Lacey and Larkin wrote an article detailing the investigation and subpoenas.
"It is, we fear, the authorities' belief that what you are about to read here is against the law to publish," they wrote. "But there are moments when civil disobedience is merely the last option. We pray that our judgment is free of arrogance."
When the paper hit the streets, deputies arrested both men. On the same day, police cited another New Times reporter for disorderly conduct after he took pictures of public documents at a local law office. (New Times reporters had long been banned from reviewing documents at the sheriff's office.)
A media firestorm ensued.
Less than 24 hours later, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas dropped all charges and fired the special prosecutor, recognizing "serious missteps had been made."
Says New Times staff writer Paul Rubin: "I think it was the politically expedient thing to do for county attorney Thomas after the remarkable outpouring of negative attention by the public and the other media toward what his people had done."
The day after the New Times arrests, police handcuffed Orlando Weekly advertising executives Jarrell Martin, Katherine Casey Miller and Christopher Whiting in connection with a two-year MBI investigation dubbed "Operation Weekly Shame." MBI claims the executives helped prostitutes craft ads that would disguise any illegal activity. In addition, MBI charged the Weekly with racketeering, alleging the paper profited from prostitution through its advertising.
"It's general knowledge that if people are coming here and looking for an escort, they go to the Orlando Weekly," says Lt. Paul Zambouros, head of the MBI's vice squad. "We would be malfeasant not to go after them."
In March, Zambouros says, MBI officials sent publisher Rick Schreiber a letter detailing arrests they had made from ads appearing in the paper and requested the paper remove the ads. Zambouros says there was no response. Nine months later, MBI filed charges.
"This is a very strange tactic that screams of retaliation," says Dalglish from RCFP, "and to throw a RICO [racketeering] charge in there is totally overboard."
Schreiber forwarded questions to Orlando Weekly's lawyer William Schaffer, who didn't return calls for comment. But in a statement released last week, Schreiber called the arrests "an outrageous abuse of process and an attempt to censor the First Amendment rights of a newspaper that has reported critically on the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation." In this week's issue, the Weekly removed adult advertising from the paper for the first time, replacing it with text from the First Amendment.
Since 2003, the Orlando Weekly has been the leading critic of the MBI. The paper's most recent story, "Operation MBI Shame" — written after the arrests — details nearly 30 years of ineptness by the MBI's vice squad, including sex with informants, destruction of evidence, orchestrating and videotaping live sex shows, the arrest of a 75-year-old woman selling commercially available pornography and one unsettling image of a MBI agent taking a picture of his penis with an agency cell phone.
Although Zambouros claims the Orlando Weekly coverage of MBI is inaccurate, he insists the agency has no beef with the paper.
"I assure you — we are not targeting them," he says. "I have no ill feelings toward them. I truly say this from the bottom of my heart: I hope they thrive. I hope they make a million dollars, as long as it's legal."
And yet the Orlando Weekly is not the only publication printing the ads MBI officials deem inappropriate. Some of the same ads that MBI officials noted in their March letter to the paper appear in the BellSouth business directory and the Orlando Sentinel. Other publications, such as the Orlando Post and the gay publication Watermark — both of which have run ads with suggestive language — have not been investigated, says Zambouros.
"I'm not aware of them," he says, but notes he did find a questionable ad "buried" in the Sentinel recently and contacted them.
"I haven't gotten a response," he says.
"Are assaults on the press increasing? I can't say for sure," says Lucy Dalglish. "General stupid behavior by public officials? That's pretty steady."
However, grand jury subpoenas against news organizations seeking reporting materials or names of sources have "definitely" increased, she says. In records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, RCFP found "approximately 65 requests for media subpoenas have been approved by the United States Attorney General since 2001" a notable increase over the pre-9/11 years. And that number doesn't include any non-federal subpoenas like the ones targeting the Phoenix New Times and Orlando Weekly.
This trend, Dalglish says, has implications for more than just journalists.
"It's important for them to stand up and say 'Hey, this is nuts,'" she says. "Because if they can do it to the New Times, they can do it to a citizen."
The U.S. Senate is currently reviewing a shield law that would protect reporters from handing over notes or sources obtained while gathering news. The Free Flow of Information Act could have played a part in the New Times case more than Orlando Weekly's, Dalglish says, but its passage could pave the way for more protections for journalists. The legislation has already passed the U.S. House and now sits on the Senate calendar.
President Bush promises to veto.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2007.